Mad About the Boy

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘Except in husbands,’ said James.

  ‘Is Frankie really seriously dodgy?’ I asked, my heart sinking, my worst suspicions confirmed.

  ‘Pretty much,’ he said, nodding. ‘But he’s not the worst of that little bunch.’

  ‘Who’s the worst?’

  ‘The other guy, the one you don’t know.’

  ‘Yeah, who was he?’

  He glanced over his shoulder again, leaned towards me and spoke as low as he could in his deep sexy voice.

  ‘Pieter van der Gaarden. He’s the really big shark in this town. Those other guys are just pilot fish compared to him. He’s South African – Afrikaner. Lost everything over there and came here with nothing, started out driving a taxi, now he’s a billionaire. He’s completely self-made, completely amoral. Not married, no kids, cares only about money. Well, money and hookers. You don’t want to know some of the things he’s involved with. I wish I didn’t sometimes. He’s a total sleaze bucket. Keeps a very low profile, never takes part in that social scene where you met the others, but controls them all – and a lot of other prominent Sydney identities – like puppets. They’re all terrified of him and in total awe.’

  ‘Because he’s the richest?’

  ‘Partly that, although no one really knows how rich he is. It’s more because he’s so brutal and so without shame, that he impresses them. They all know that somewhere inside they have a soft centre, a certain point beyond which they couldn’t go and they know he doesn’t have it. It frightens and excites them.’

  I sat and digested what he was saying. I had already suspected Frankie was dodgy and I certainly knew how vile David Maier was, but I was surprised at Roger Thorogood.

  ‘Is Roger dot-dot-dot really as bad as the others? I mean – he’s an MP now, he’s a cabinet minister …’ I realized, as I said it, how naïve I sounded and James’s face confirmed it. ‘I guess he is then,’ I added, starting to feel a bit depressed about it all.

  ‘Any cabinet minister seen hanging around with Mr You Know Who – let’s call him Mr P – is extremely suspect,’ said James. ‘Especially the Minister for Planning. Which is probably why they were there at four in the morning.’

  I looked back at him, the full weight of the situation finally sinking in. It also occurred to me that this might explain Suzy Thorogood’s sudden change of character. Maybe she knew what Roger was up to and was terrified anyone would find out. I didn’t blame her.

  ‘I guess it’s pretty serious then …’ I said weakly.

  James nodded. I had the feeling he didn’t like having to tell me any of it.

  ‘Those guys are the heavy mob, Antonia. There’s nothing Mickey Mouse about Mr P – or Frankie, for that matter. A woman organizing a protest against another site they were involved with – a lovely old terrace street down on the water in Balmain – mysteriously disappeared five years ago and she’s not the only one. We reckon concrete over-boots and so do the police – the ones they aren’t paying off, that is. Now they want this site developed. They stand to make millions out of it – it’s a big scheme even for Mr P – and they will go to almost any lengths to make sure it happens.’

  ‘Especially David you-know-who,’ I said.

  James inclined his head. ‘Why do you say that?’

  I lowered my voice. ‘Because his business is in serious trouble – he really needs the money.’

  ‘And he’s a nasty piece of work, I hear. Beats his wife? Is that right?’

  I nodded. I didn’t feel ready yet to tell James just how nasty David Maier was, but I had a feeling I would one day.

  I finished my coffee and finally James drove me home. As we approached my street he opened the glove box and took out his baseball cap and the horrible big specs I was so used to. Driving with one hand, he put them on. Reality crashed back down on me like an unexpected wave.

  ‘Are you going to the shop today?’ he asked me.

  I nodded. ‘I’m already late,’ I said. ‘Dee will be waiting for me …’

  ‘Just try to act normally,’ he said. ‘She won’t know anything about what Frankie is up to at the King George and, with any luck, she’ll never have to. What we are trying to do is to stop them in their tracks at this stage, using the official channels, before it gets any uglier.’

  He pulled up a few doors away from my house and took my hand – after glancing in the rear-view mirror, I noticed. Once again, he didn’t turn off the engine.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t even need to say this to you, Antonia. But don’t say anything about last night to anyone. Not even about what has happened between us. If it does turn nasty, you will not want to be associated with me, believe me. Just trust me on this. OK? It’s nothing shifty on my part, I just don’t want anything to happen to you.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, simultaneously thrilled that he cared and sick that he wouldn’t come inside right now and ravish me again.

  He leaned over and kissed me very tenderly, nuzzling my cheek with his nose.

  ‘I won’t be able to see you for a few days,’ he said. ‘I have a lot to do, I may even have to go interstate, but I will see you at the gym as soon as I’m back. For the time being that is still the best place for us to meet. Just keep going there. I have your number and you can call me there if you need to find me. I’ll always get a message. Your code name can be Jane, OK?’

  ‘You Tarzan, me Jane,’ I said lamely, starting to feel totally miserable at the thought of the imminent separation.

  He laughed and I got reluctantly out of the car. As he drove off I suddenly realized why all the cloak and dagger malarkey was really necessary. Frankie and David Maier had only seen the back of my head, up at the King George Hospital – but they’d seen James’s face. He was a marked man.

  17

  Percy was sitting at the kitchen table when I walked in from James’s car, nursing his cup of green tea and doing the crossword in the Sydney Morning Herald. He glanced up at me over his half-moon glasses, which on him somehow looked perfectly at one with a pierced eyebrow and spiky hair.

  He said nothing, but I saw a smile flit across his face as he turned back to the paper.

  ‘Have fun, Antonia?’ he asked, in an innocent voice, which was clearly anything but. ‘Pleasant evening?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said primly. ‘Did Tom behave himself?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Percy. ‘We had a lovely time. We played Boggle and then we played Cluedo. I was Miss Scarlet. Needless to say, Tom – Colonel Mustard – won. Incidentally, he wanted to bring you breakfast in bed this morning, but I told him not to disturb you, as you’d had a very late night and would be awfully tired and grumpy. Let’s just say, I had a little inkling that you wouldn’t be back last night.’

  ‘Oh really,’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘I looked out of the window when you were leaving. Saw the driver. I wouldn’t have come home either.’

  Not trusting myself to keep quiet, I left the room as fast as I could. Working on my strongly held belief that a secret is something you don’t tell anybody, that had to include Percy, although I knew it would be next to impossible to keep him off the trail. He had a retriever’s instinct for sniffing out anything you were keeping from him.

  As I ran upstairs I could hear him whistling ‘Some Enchanted Evening’.

  I felt rather filthy after my night of carnal knowledge, much of it spent rolling around on the ground, but I didn’t want to have a shower, as it would wash the last traces of James off me. I considered calling in sick to Dee, so that I could just lie in bed all day, smelling him on my skin and luxuriating in the memory of the night before. Little vignettes of the last twelve hours kept popping into my head, causing mass rioting in my gonads and I wanted to enjoy it while it lasted, in case the doubts set in again.

  I also wanted some time to digest the implications of seeing Frankie and the other two up there, but I forced myself to bathe, get dressed and go. James had told me to act normal
ly and I knew the sooner I saw Dee and got on with it, the better.

  I felt a little awkward when I first walked in. She looked just the same as ever, with her quiet, sweet smile, and so pleased to see me that I felt I was somehow betraying her. But what could I do? It wasn’t my fault her husband was a semi-criminal property developer and it was obvious from her cagey ways that she had a pretty good idea how dodgy he was.

  Luckily the shop was really busy, with lots of particularly demanding customers providing the ideal distraction. One of my least favourite types were the women who would demand to have an old blanket or basket in another colour, as though I had a warehouse of them at my disposal. ‘Have you got this in lemon?’ was the sort of thing they’d say and it was all I could do not to reply, ‘Try IKEA.’ Normally they drove me nuts, but that day I was delighted by the diversions.

  Even so, thoughts of James would spring into my head constantly, but I just let them bob around for a moment, before pushing them away and getting back to the work at hand. I was a little dizzy from the rush of it all and my extreme lack of sleep, but mainlining skinny milk lattes, I got through it.

  At about five o’clock, when Dee had left for one of her myriad beauty appointments, the phone rang.

  ‘Say it’s a wrong number, if you can’t talk,’ said James’s deep sexy voice. I sank down onto the nearest armchair, practically fainting with pleasure at hearing him.

  ‘I can talk,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said, chuckling. ‘I just drove past Dee in Double Bay.’

  ‘Why don’t you come over and see me then?’ I said. ‘You must be round the corner.’

  ‘I am and I’d love to, but I can’t. Even this is foolish, but I just wanted to hear your voice.’

  We breathed down the phone at each other for a moment, savouring the connection. James spoke first.

  ‘What have you done to me?’ he said. ‘There I was – a perfectly happy celibate kung fu weirdo in specs and then along comes this little English girl with beautiful sad eyes and seduces me. Next thing I knew I was eating bacon.’

  I just giggled. I was so happy I couldn’t speak.

  ‘Anyway, naughty little English girl,’ he continued, ‘I’m on my way to the airport. I won’t be back until next week. I’m not even sure which day, but I’ll be at the gym as soon as I’m back in town. Just make sure you’re there, usual time, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, almost weeping at the thought of not seeing him again for days.

  He paused again.

  ‘I can still smell you on my fingers,’ he said, causing a major earthquake in my lower body. ‘That is, the ones that don’t smell of bacon.’

  I giggled some more. I was a jelly. A useless jelly.

  ‘Bye, Grasshopper,’ said James, tenderly. ‘Take care.’ And he was gone.

  I sang all the way home. When I got there, I whisked Tom off his feet and spun him round until he was breathless with giggles. I cooked him and Percy dinner, giving them their favourite chocolate ice cream for pudding and I wouldn’t let Percy do any clearing up. I was so happy, I could do it all. Percy watched me with one eyebrow raised and I didn’t care.

  At about nine thirty, the fact that I hadn’t slept at all the night before finally caught up with me and I crashed out. As I drifted off to sleep, the last thing on my mind was James holding my head and that first kiss when I knew he meant it. Oh joy oh bliss oh gorgeous speccy kung fu weirdo sex god. I kissed my pillow.

  *

  James’s handsome face was the first thing on my mind when I woke up the next morning too, but by midday I was starting to feel decidedly flat. Although I’d slept eleven hours straight, I was still aware of every hour of sleep I’d missed out on the previous night. I had serious sleep lag and it was making me cranky.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Dee asked, after I’d snapped at a bike messenger who was late delivering something. It wasn’t like me at all, but I was feeling so irritable. I wanted to speak to James again, I wanted to see him, I wanted to touch him. I wanted to fuck him. Sorry, but I did.

  Every moment that passed made his absence more painful and made me start to wonder whether I’d imagined the whole thing. I’d get little flashes of the way he had made me feel, which were enough to torture me and also to make me wonder if anything could really be that good. Because I was also wondering, deep down, what the hell I was doing getting this involved with someone. The Hugo hurt was still there and I didn’t think I could take any more, if James turned out to be a rotter, or gay, or whatever.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dee,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve got a bad case of the pre-menstrual blues. I feel really grumpy.’

  More like post-coital blues, I thought guiltily, but I couldn’t tell her the truth, which just added to my general irritation. I hated lying to a friend.

  Dee smiled fondly.

  ‘I thought it was something like that,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you go home? We’re not so busy today and I’ve got nothing on. Go home and lie down and watch daytime TV.’

  And that’s exactly what I did – in between staring at the ceiling and thinking about James, that is. With every minute that passed from our last contact, I felt a little more confused. I would veer from ecstatic swooning that I had met such a gorgeous, sexy and affectionate man, to total bewilderment. I didn’t know where he was. I didn’t have his home phone number. I didn’t even know where he lived. Whenever I’d asked him he’d managed to change the subject. I could see how good he must be at his job – the one outside the gym, that is. He was so very good at disappearing.

  On the other hand, I kept thinking, he’d made it clear to me that it wasn’t just a one-night stand to him, or even a happy accident. He’d told me, straight up, that he’d liked me for a long time. Just as I had liked him. But it still felt so weird. What would happen next? Was he going to be my boyfriend?

  It all seemed back to front. We’d had the most amazing sex and I felt incredibly close to him, but we hadn’t done any of the things I thought you were supposed to do, when you were working up to having a full-on sexual relationship with someone – going out to dinner, seeing movies, going round art galleries, meeting each other’s friends and all that – but in some ways I actually knew him really well, from all our talking at the gym. I didn’t know what we were.

  Unlike my sisters I had so little experience of men and ‘dating’. They seemed to go through men like tissues, but James was only the third one I’d ever had sex with. It all seemed very complicated, the way they described it.

  When I lived in London we had quite often had emergency summit meetings to discuss their latest romantic fiascos. Not that I was much help to either of them, but I was always happy to be a sympathetic ear. And at least my naïve contributions made them laugh.

  Now I longed to ring them to talk about James, to ask them what I should do and think about it all, but apart from breaking my secrecy promise to him, there was another part of me that didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened, not even them. It would somehow destroy the magic to put it into words. It could sound sordid, to describe our passionate night together, when it had been so, well, beautiful.

  With all this sloshing around in my head, I didn’t go back to the gym for the first few days. It would be too redolent of James, I thought, and make it all the more painful that he wasn’t there. But after four nights spinning on my mattress, I decided that a workout would be a useful sleep aid, just as they had been when I first started going to Muscle City.

  It felt good to be back, when I finally walked in, even despite a completely irrational stab of disappointment when James wasn’t at the desk. Worst luck, it was scary Spider.

  ‘G’day,’ he said, gruffly, not even looking at me, but after he had swiped my card, he looked up suddenly and gave me one of his appraising stares. I felt like a kitten being sized up by a bull terrier. ‘Humph,’ he said, or something grunty that sounded like that. ‘Got a message for you.’

  He scrabbled around under the desk a
nd then handed me a sheet from a phone message pad, with the following words on it, in appalling writing: ‘Miss ya heaps. See ya soon. Keep breathing. Tarzan.’

  I hoped the ‘ya’s were Spider’s spelling and not Tarzan’s.

  ‘Bloke rang and left it earlier,’ he said. ‘Sounded pissed. Guess you’d have to be to leave a message like that. Tarzan …’ He snorted, with his usual contempt, scratched his belly and went back to the racing section of the paper.

  I whizzed through my workout with a big smile on my face, although I was slightly puzzled by the notion of James drunk. He’d told me he never touched alcohol.

  I’d been to the gym three more times before I was finally rewarded. After eight agonizing days since he’d dropped me off at home, I walked in to see James on the desk. I didn’t even mind the stupid hat and specs, I was so pleased to see him. He flashed me a beaming smile and then went back to getting some sports drinks out of the fridge for a group of men in very tight shorts.

  ‘I’ll be right with you,’ he said to me, over his shoulder, with impressive sang-froid.

  As soon as they’d gone, he turned back to me and leaned over the counter far further than he needed to take my membership card.

  ‘Hello, beautiful,’ he whispered and squeezed my hand as he took the card. I just stood there gawping at him, with what I’m sure was a very dumb smile on my face. All my doubts and fears had disappeared. Once I had seen how he looked at me, none of that other stuff mattered.

  More people came in behind me and James got official again.

  ‘I’m a bit tied up here, at the moment, Antonia,’ he said in formal tones. ‘But I’ll come and go through your routine with you later, when Bob gets in, OK? Shouldn’t be long.’

  And he winked at me, causing an eruption in my cycle shorts.

  It seemed like about three hours later, but was probably only twenty minutes, when I was lying on the hip extension and heard a deep voice in my right ear.