Be Careful What You Wish For

by Gemma Crisp

  ‘There you are! Mwah, mwah, darling!’ The glamorous whirlwind that was Taya kissed her on each cheek, then wasted no time in checking out what Nina was wearing. ‘Girl, you are looking damn fine!’

  ‘It’s all thanks to you guys; I bought the top and skirt yesterday with my Harvey Nicks vouchers. So you approve?’

  ‘Hell yes, I approve! You’ll be getting lucky tonight, my friend!’

  ‘Hah, I seriously doubt that. It’s been so long, I wouldn’t know what to do anymore. I’ve managed to survive two years of England without getting much bedroom action and I can’t see that changing just because it’s my last night in the country!’

  ‘So you guys fly out tomorrow afternoon? Are you all packed and ready to go?’

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘You must be so excited to be going home! I’ve never been to Sydney but my friends say it’s ahhh-mazing. I’m so jealous; I’d love to live in Australia.’

  ‘You can come visit! I’m really going to miss you guys, I had the best time working at Marie Claude. I learnt so much about the magazine industry and everyone was so lovely. I thought Charlotte would be a total bitch to me, but I think being her PA at the start helped a lot.’

  Taya looked at Nina like she wanted to say something but shouldn’t, then blurted out, ‘It wasn’t being Charlotte’s PA that made her like you so much, although I guess that might have helped.’

  Nina frowned. ‘I don’t understand; what do you mean?’

  Taya looked around to make sure the rest of the Marie Claude crew were safely out of earshot. ‘Charlotte took a shine to you because you’re Australian. She has a soft spot for Aussies because that’s where her husband was from.’

  ‘Her husband? But Charlotte has a boyfriend.’

  ‘I know that, stupid. But before him she was married to an Aussie guy for ten years, give or take. From what I’ve heard, she was a different person back then – totally loved up and much less of a nightmare than she is now.’

  ‘What happened? Did they divorce or something?’

  ‘No,’ said Taya, lowering her voice. ‘He died unexpectedly, from some sort of cancer. Apparently it was really sudden – one of those cases where you’re diagnosed out of the blue and only given weeks to live. She was devastated; it’s taken her years to come to terms with it and she’s only just started dating again. Anyway, from all accounts, he was more Australian than the lovechild of Crocodile Dundee and Dame Edna Everage, so that’s why she has a soft spot for anyone who’s from Down Under.’

  Nina was stunned. She’d had no idea that Charlotte, the impossibly glamorous editor-in-chief who had the A-list on speed dial, had gone through so much heartbreak. ‘It just goes to show that someone can look like they have it all on the outside, but be crumbling on the inside,’ Nina thought to herself.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ she said out loud. ‘Poor Charlotte.’

  ‘Shhh, here comes the woman herself,’ Taya hissed, before scuttling over to the safety of the Marie Claude group in her studded Valentino snakeskin kitten heels.

  Nina swivelled to see Charlotte, decked out in an acid yellow Lanvin cocktail dress, making her way through the crowd towards her. She had only invited the editor-in-chief to her leaving party to be polite; she’d never expected her to actually turn up. Suddenly, she was glad that the concierge at Tess’s hotel had insisted on booking the private room at the members club on their behalf, rather than having it at the local bland All Bar One, like they’d originally planned.

  ‘Charlotte, how nice of you to come, I really appreciate it,’ Nina stammered awkwardly, acutely conscious of what she now knew about the editor’s personal life and hoping her face didn’t give it away.

  ‘To be honest, I wasn’t going to come at all, but it’s on my way to Stella’s fortieth birthday dinner, so I thought I’d drop in,’ Charlotte retorted. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ Without waiting for answer, she commanded the attention of the barman and ordered a bottle of Cristal, discreetly pushing her black American Express card across the bar.

  ‘Cheers – here’s to your new life in Sydney!’ Charlotte smiled tightly at Nina, raising the glass of bubbles. As Nina was wondering if she’d just imagined the tinge of sadness in Charlotte’s perfectly made-up eyes when she mentioned the Australian city, the editor-in-chief continued talking. ‘Now, the reason I came was to give you this,’ she said, handing over a business card. ‘An old colleague of mine works in Sydney – she’s the publisher at a magazine company there. I’ve been in touch with her this week and one of her magazines is looking for an editorial assistant. I’ve already told her about you being a fairly decent intern at Marie Claude, so she’s expecting you to get in touch when you arrive. I believe she’s keeping the job open for you, so don’t waste any time. Try not to reflect badly on me, will you, Nina? I don’t go out of my way to help people very often, you know,’ she said.

  Nina was utterly speechless. Ten minutes before, she’d been stressing about having to navigate the waters of the Australian magazine world without her Marie Claude safety net, and now she’d just been handed a job on a silver platter – accompanied by a bottle of Cristal to wash it down with!

  ‘Charlotte, I can’t thank you enough. Seriously, you don’t know what this means to me . . .’

  Charlotte glanced at her vintage Rolex then interrupted. ‘What nonsense, Nina; all I did was contact an old friend in the industry. Now, I have to dash – the McCartney family has a thing about lateness. Enjoy your last night in London and good luck for Sydney.’ She pivoted on her Nicholas Kirkwood spike heels and disappeared into the crowd, leaving Nina staring at the business card in her hand, trying to absorb what had just happened. After a minute or two, she shook her head, seized the ice bucket with the bottle of eye-wateringly expensive champagne that Charlotte had left sitting on the bar, grabbed two more glasses from the barman then made her way over to where Tess was deep in conversation with Johan.

  ‘Well, well, well, who did you have to blow to get that?’ demanded Johan, practically salivating as Nina poured them each a glass of bubbles.

  ‘Wow, you’re all class tonight, aren’t you? I didn’t have to blow anyone, but thanks for asking. The editor of Marie Claude just bought it for me, actually.’

  ‘Charlotte? Charlotte was here?’ Tess asked incredulously, her eyes darting around in hope of catching a glimpse of the high-powered editor.

  ‘She sure was,’ Nina said, trying to keep a lid on her excitement. ‘She had to go to Stella McCartney’s birthday dinner, but before she left, she gave me this.’ She showed them the business card.

  ‘It’s too dark to see. What is it?’ asked Tess, taking a big slurp from her champagne flute.

  ‘It’s the business card of a magazine publisher in Sydney who’s a friend of hers. There’s an editorial position going at one of her titles, which she’s holding open until I get there. Guys, I think I’ve got a JOB!!!’ Nina almost screamed.

  ‘Oh my God, that’s amazing,’ Tess squealed.

  ‘Congratulations!’ Johan said.

  Nina looked at her two best friends and couldn’t help thinking this was the happiest she’d ever felt.

  ‘I guess this calls for a toast,’ said Johan, raising his glass. ‘Here’s to Sydney!’

  Nina and Tess smiled at each other and clinked their glasses together with Johan’s, as they repeated his words: ‘Here’s to Sydney!’

  SYDNEY

  eight

  Sitting on the back seat of the ancient station wagon, Nina made the difficult choice between protecting her freshly GHD’d hair or melting into a puddle by rolling the car window the rest of the way down. The humidity slapped her across the face like a warm wet towel and the buzz of cicadas droned loudly in her eardrums. Squinting through her mirrored Ray-Ban aviators as the late afternoon Sydney sun blasted her eyeballs, she sat back and listened to Tess in the front seat, chatting easily to Leo as he drove them home from the airport.

  Leo, an old school friend of Tess
’s, had agreed to let the girls stay at his place while they looked for somewhere to live. Nina had never met the guy before but Tess had told her that he lived with two other guys in a sharehouse in the inner-city hipster suburb of Surry Hills. He was about to take off on a six-month trip around South America and had tried to offload his soon-to-be-vacant room to them, but after having been sardines with Camille for two years, there was no way in hell Tess and Nina were getting sucked into the sharing black hole again. The plan was for Tess to sleep on a mattress on the floor in Leo’s room while Nina made herself comfortable on the couch. It wasn’t the most glamorous start to their Sydney adventure, but they were hoping it would be a case of days, rather than weeks, before they scored their own place – with two separate bedrooms. Tess, being the more organised of the two, had already done her research on suitable areas and had announced that Potts Point, Darlinghurst and Rushcutters Bay would be their first ports of call. They’d scrapped the idea of Bondi Beach after realising what a bitch it was to commute to via public transport. Besides, why surround themselves with transplanted Poms when they’d just been immersed with the natives in the Motherland?

  ‘So what do you do for a crust, Nina?’ Leo asked in his ocker accent, eyeing her in the rear-view mirror. ‘You don’t work in a bed factory like Tess, do you?’ he joked, knowing full well that Tess had only ever worked in exclusive boutique hotels, as opposed to the massive global chains with two-thousand-plus rooms that prided themselves on looking exactly the same, no matter where you were in the world.

  ‘Not anymore – I’m a journalist; I work in women’s magazines,’ she informed him, trying not to feel like a total fraud. It was true, she told herself fiercely – she might only have three months’ experience under her faux Gucci belt, but with her by-line attached to a small Q&A with a next-big-thing DJ on Marie Claude’s website, she was now officially a published writer. Ignoring the gnawing feeling she was pretending to be something she wasn’t, Nina forced herself to tune back into what Leo was saying.

  ‘. . . Like Cosmo and that? Awesome! Me and the boys can provide you with plenty of material if you need it for stories. Let us know if you need any talent for those “man candy” photo shoots before I head overseas, I reckon that’d be ace! Total chick magnet, for sure,’ he said, reminding her of Tigger as he practically bounced up and down with enthusiasm.

  ‘Er, I’ve only worked on one magazine so far,’ Nina admitted, ‘and it was a bit more high-brow than Cosmo, but I have an interview tomorrow with the publisher of Modern Woman, so fingers crossed.’

  ‘Yeah? Wow, good luck with that. Here we are, ladies – home, sweet home.’

  As the battered car came to a shuddering halt, Nina and Tess looked at each other in dismay. They’d been told Leo’s sharehouse wasn’t exactly palatial but the lopsided terrace with peeling paint, an overgrown garden and a graffiti-covered front fence looked like it belonged on a council estate back in south-east London, not in one of Sydney’s hippest suburbs.

  ‘Christ almighty, Tess better get on the phone to the real estate agents first thing tomorrow,’ Nina thought. ‘That’s if we survive the night and aren’t eaten alive by cockroaches and bed bugs.’

  As if she could tell what Nina was thinking, Tess mouthed, ‘It’ll be fine’ at her as they peeled themselves off the sticky vinyl seats and clambered out of the car.

  Reaching into the boot to wrestle with one of their suitcases, Nina was only vaguely aware of Leo calling out, ‘Hey Jez, come and give us a hand, will you?’

  Suddenly a strong, hairy arm reached over hers and grabbed the case out of her hands, then picked up another like it was full of marshmallows and swung them both effortlessly onto the nature strip next to the car. Turning around, Nina’s brain lapped up the alpha male specimen who was standing in front of her. Her eyes travelled from his thick wavy brown hair and green eyes to shoulders the width of Uluru, right down to tree-trunk thighs encased in board shorts. She swallowed. Or at least tried to.

  ‘Hey, I’m Jeremy, one of Leo’s housemates. You’re Nina, right?’

  ‘Right,’ she croaked, shaking Mr Extremely Tall, Very Dark and Incredibly Handsome’s huge outstretched paw, then followed him into the house of horrors. Plonking the suitcases down in the dingy hallway, Jeremy led the way into the living room, where Tess was perched gingerly on a threadbare sofa that was missing one of its arms and pretty much all its cushions. Behind it was a slightly better couch, propped up on blue and orange milk crates.

  ‘How do you like our grandstand seating?’ Leo asked proudly, gesturing towards the set-up. Nina had been so busy cataloguing the sticky carpet, the curtains made out of Sydney Swans AFL flags and the Mount Everest of dirty dishes threatening to topple over any minute in the kitchen sink, that she hadn’t noticed what was obviously the boys’ pride and joy – a gleaming sixty-inch plasma television and surround sound system, complete with cable TV box, PlayStation, Nintendo Wii and X-Box consoles and a hectic tangle of wires duct-taped to the wall, all positioned directly in front of the couches.

  ‘We have some fully sick nights here with the crew when a big match is on,’ Leo continued. ‘Everyone brings a slab of beer, we dial in some pizza and chill out watching cricket, rugby, AFL, Premier League, whatever. It can get pretty rowdy though, so the neighbours hate it, don’t they, Jez?’

  Nina tried not to look at Jeremy as he verified Leo’s story, but couldn’t help sneaking another glance, just to confirm she still found him as insanely attractive as she had two minutes ago. ‘Typical,’ she thought, as a swarm of butterflies fluttered to life in her stomach. ‘I meet a hot guy within an hour of landing in Sydney, but of course he lives in a Neanderthal cesspit. Not ideal.’

  Realising that Jeremy was staring at her staring at him, Nina blurted out, ‘C’mon, Tess, let’s get the rest of the bags from the car.’ She looked at her cousin with what she hoped was an urgent ‘we need to talk’ expression.

  ‘I can do that,’ Jeremy said, oblivious. ‘Leo, make yourself useful and get the girls a drink,’ he called over his shoulder as he strode down the hallway. As Leo opened the fridge, Nina pretended she hadn’t seen the congealed noodles spilling out from crusty takeaway containers or the slimy green sticks that had once called themselves celery crammed in among the bottles of beer. Urrrgh.

  ‘What can I get you? We’ve got beer . . . um . . . more beer . . . another type of beer . . .’ Leo looked at the two girls, waiting expectantly for an answer.

  ‘Don’t s’pose you’ve got any gin?’ Nina said hopefully, thinking a frosty cold G&T was just the elixir she needed.

  ‘I think there’s some leftover vodka stashed in the freezer from a house party, if you’re not beer drinkers,’ Jeremy’s voice called out as he dumped the last of their stuff in the hallway.

  ‘That’ll do, thanks,’ Nina squeaked awkwardly, almost breaking out into a sweat as he brushed past her on his way to the kitchen. Tess raised an eyebrow at her, then whispered, ‘Are you okay?’ as the guys twisted open beers, cracked ice blocks out of their trays and found a random bottle of tonic at the back of the pantry.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she whispered back. ‘I feel a bit weird. Not sick or anything, just a bit strange. I’ll be fine, it’s probably just the heat,’ she said quickly, as she saw her cousin’s concerned look.

  ‘Why don’t you get changed? I think we’re moving to the courtyard out the back,’ Tess said, gesturing to the guys, who were carrying the drinks, plus a packet of corn chips and a jar of salsa, out the back door.

  Nina nodded, collected her suitcase from the hallway and dragged it into the bathroom. ‘Right, what should I change into?’ she asked herself. Something cool, obviously; the humidity was killing her. It was definitely the moisture in the air that was making her feel spacy – it was nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Jeremy. She was about to dump a pile of clothes on the floor, then noticed how filthy the tiles were and placed them on top of the washing machine instead. She held up a dress and
studied it critically. No, not casual enough. She picked up a top. No, too low-cut – she didn’t want him to think she was getting the girls out for him. Was he a legs or a boobs man? she wondered. She was startled by a banging on the door.

  ‘Nina! You’ve been in here for ages; I thought you’d passed out or something!’ Tess exclaimed when Nina unlocked the door.

  ‘Sorry, chook, I was just trying to find something suitable to wear. What do you think between this and this?’ she asked, holding up two options. ‘Or maybe this?’ she added, scooping up another option from the pile. Tess shot her a knowing look.

  ‘Would this agony of indecision have anything to do with Jeremy, by any chance?’ she asked sweetly.

  ‘What?! Who? Don’t be ridiculous!’ Nina tried to bluff, but knew by the look on her cousin’s face she was failing miserably. Tess knew her too well. ‘Don’t you think he’s kind of cute?’ she asked.