‘Just give me a minute, m’love.’ Amy pushed herself upright and quickly wiped her eyes. ‘Okay.’
‘Does that mean I can come in?’
‘Yeah.’
Stephen opened the door and let himself in, closing it behind him with a quiet click before taking a seat on the edge of Amy’s bed. His big frame caused the old mattress to dip comically, but neither of them commented. Instead, Stephen’s blond brows were beetled, his expression concerned as he took in Amy’s appearance and her dejected expression.
Amy quickly ran her thumbs under her eyes to catch any smudged mascara.
‘Don’t bother,’ Stephen said as she reached up to tidy her hair. ‘I’ve seen you look worse.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Actually, a lot worse.’
Amy grimaced at the memory of the day he’d witnessed their family meltdown on her front porch the year before. She’d been a wreck that day. She and Jo had learned just how little they meant to their mother in the most awful way possible when she’d chosen their violent father over them. Their mum had walked away without expressing any remorse or regret that Jo had been injured trying to rescue her or that she was leaving devastation in her wake.
The memory was still fresh enough to stab through Amy’s chest, bringing the tears she had just been fighting to the surface again.
‘Although you’re lookin’ pretty scary now.’
‘Gee, thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ Stephen smiled gently. ‘How’re you holding up?’
‘I’d be better if everyone hadn’t spent the day acting like I’m some kind of idiot.’ Amy reached over to her bedside for a tissue and blew her nose. ‘Break-ins happen all the time, but Jo and Scott are behaving like I’ve been asking for this to happen.’
‘Yeah, they’ve been pretty awful.’ Stephen nodded thoughtfully. ‘But you know they’re acting like that because they’re pissed off on your behalf and they’re worried about you. So am I, for that matter, but it doesn’t seem to be helping you much.’
‘No, it’s not. I know this is a lot to ask, Stephen, but could you get Jo out of my hair for a bit?’ Amy asked. ‘I mean, thanks heaps for driving up here to help, but I really need some quiet time right now to deal.’
‘Say no more.’ Stephen got up. ‘Want me to get Scott out of here too?’
‘Yeah.’ Amy felt relief wash through her, followed immediately by a wave of guilt. ‘I sound like an inconsiderate heifer, don’t I?’
‘Nah. Just someone who’s had enough.’ His eyes crinkled at the corners. ‘I’ll get the terrible twosome outta your hair if you promise me you’ll get some security lighting and better locks. An alarm would be the best but I can see by the way you’re already shaking your head—’
‘No alarm.’ Amy didn’t want to tell Stephen she couldn’t afford the cost of installation right now. Although her businesses were doing well, she still had salaries and bills to pay, not to mention the exorbitant cost of rewiring the building housing Babyface and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes earlier this year.
‘I had a feeling you’d say that. So instead, I’m going to ask you to do something else for me.’ Stephen looked up at the roof which, despite its current water fastness, featured the stains left over from the old leaks Amy had repaired.
‘What?’ Amy asked warily.
‘If you’re not gonna get an alarm, at least get a dog, eh? Something with a loud bark and big teeth.’ He levelled a serious look at her that said he meant business. ‘Not a wimpy little rat thing. A proper dog. Burglars usually check out a place they’ve done over a few months later to see if the owner’s got a whole lot of new stuff. Make sure you have something that makes a ton of noise by then.’
Amy frowned. The police had said the same thing but still . . . a dog? ‘I don’t know . . .’
‘You want me yelling at you too?’ Stephen’s tone turned no-nonsense, his expression shifting to a formidable frown.
‘Nope,’ Amy said straight away. ‘I’ll think about it. Does that work for you?’
‘Nope. How about you just do it or Jo and I will get one for you?’ He smiled but his determination was clear. ‘Knowing Jo, she’ll buy you a psychotic Doberman.’
‘No thank you.’ Amy grimaced. She climbed off her bed and gave her soon-to-be brother-in-law a peck on the cheek. ‘Thanks, sweetie.’
‘My pleasure. Take your time. I’ll sort them out, alright?’ With that, Stephen opened the door and stalked back down to the kitchen, booming, ‘Jesus Christ! Give it a rest, you two. You’re painful!’
Amy used the ensuing blissful minutes of stunned silence to pull herself together before venturing back out to the kitchen.
Stephen had snagged Jo around her waist with one well-muscled arm and was whispering something into her ear. From Jo’s scowl, Amy guessed her sister wasn’t too happy about what she was hearing. Scott was leaning against a kitchen bench gripping a cup of coffee and looking just as disgruntled. A foot shorter than everyone else in the room and dreading yet more confrontation, Amy forced a smile. ‘Any coffee for me?’
Scott thrust his cup at her. ‘Here.’
‘Gee, thanks.’ Her words were liberally sprinkled with sarcasm.
‘Amy?’ Jo asked, ignoring Stephen’s squeeze around her ribs.
‘Yeah.’ Amy looked from Jo’s face to Scott’s, her stomach sinking. They’d obviously got themselves worked up again in the few minutes she’d been out of the room.
‘What’s this about you having a one-nighter with a British comedian?’
‘Ben!’
‘Colin.’ Ben stalked across the Heathrow Terminal Five arrival hall to greet his personal assistant, who looked like a sharply dressed marshmallow in a black Paul Smith suit and strawberry pink shirt. Not bothering with pleasantries, Ben continued speaking. ‘Before you ask, the flight was shit and I’m knackered, so you can save the excuses for why I’m here to fix this gargantuan cock-up until later.’
Well versed in Ben’s moods, Colin nodded, smoothing a hand over his neatly side-parted mousy brown hair. ‘I’ve got the car parked not far from here. Can I take that?’ He reached out a hand for Ben’s black leather Tumi carry-on.
‘I’ve got it,’ Ben growled, but thrust the duty-free bag he was carrying in his other hand towards Colin’s chest. ‘Laphroig Quarter Cask and a bloody massive Toblerone that I felt like an idiot buying. My gift to you.’
‘And the moisturiser?’ Colin enquired with a wide grin as Ben made a beeline for the exit.
The doors opened and Ben’s scowl turned positively feral as the ball-shrinking chill and oppressive greyness of home sweet home greeted his senses. Summer in England, wasn’t it grand? He spared some of his displeasure for his long-time friend and employee. ‘In the bag too. Never again, Colin. I know you love the man but he’s a sadistic fiend. You can tell Sharif that was the last time I buy him any duty free. If I had to rank excruciating experiences on a scale of one to ten – which way?’ Colin gestured to the right. Ben veered off and continued walking at the same pace. ‘On a scale of one to ten, buying male moisturiser in Dubai airport was a ten. Possibly the most unmanning experience of my existence.’
Colin chuckled, causing his second chin to wobble somewhat endearingly. ‘Sounds like fantastic material to me. Sharif says thanks.’
‘Yes. Well, there is that.’ Ben came to halt in front of his Mercedes SLK Roadster and held out a hand. ‘Keys.’
Colin handed them to him. ‘I’ve set up a meeting with Bright Star for four this afternoon and Ross wants you to drop in and see him over lunch.’
‘Ross say what was taxing his shimmering intellect?’ Ben slid behind the wheel, waited for Colin to climb in, then roared out of the car park.
‘Something about your last column getting a lot of positive attention. Wants you to do a series of sorts. There was something else too . . . not sure what it’s all about. He wouldn’t tell me.’ Colin averted his eyes from the road, wincing as Ben pulled out onto the M4 heading towards London and slammed h
is foot down on the accelerator.
‘Next time, get out the thumb screws. It’s what I pay you for and we both know Ross likes it,’ Ben said with his first smile of the day at the thought of a gentle soul like Colin trying to go head to head with Ross Crankshaft, newspaper editor and amateur rugby player extraordinaire. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Eleven.’ Colin closed his eyes and clutched his pudgy hands around Ben’s briefcase as Ben veered sharply around a slow-moving lorry.
‘Add seven hours onto that . . . six p.m., she might still be there,’ Ben mumbled to himself, pulling his phone out of his pocket and thrusting it at Colin. ‘Look up Babyface in my contacts for me, will you? Thanks.’ He cursed himself for not asking for Amy’s phone number, or her email address at the very least, before she’d scampered off on Saturday night, especially now that he knew she inexplicably had no social media presence. Now he was stuck trying to call her at work, the only number he had for her, with a seven-hour time difference.
He’d been looking forward to driving around on Monday and surprising her with flowers and a nice lunch if she was amenable, but instead he’d ended up trying to get sleep on an international flight back to the motherland. Not that he’d actually slept. Instead he’d been shadowed with a faint feeling of panic that in leaving Australia so soon after Saturday night, he may have cocked up on a grand scale. It shouldn’t matter after only knowing the lady for such a short time, but it did.
‘Got it,’ Colin announced. ‘Want me to call on speaker?’
‘Yes, please,’ Ben replied curtly, then cursed a few minutes later when the call rang out.
‘Try again?’
‘No,’ Ben sighed. ‘Let’s just get these meetings out of the way so I can get some sleep. I’ll have to try again later. For now, I need a shower and a shave. Reschedule my meeting with Ross to two. If he complains tell him I’ll have my lunch when I’m bloody well ready, then book me on a return flight to Perth tomorrow morning around ten. I don’t care which airline. I just want to get back.’
‘Ten?’ Colin’s incredulity was palpable. ‘That means you would have to be up around six. Six a.m. Are you sure? You haven’t been up before ten since you tried out breakfast radio for that week in two thousand and ten.’
‘I have recently, as a matter of fact, and I’ll have you know that I did two weeks for that breakfast gig . . .’ Ben ignored Colin’s snicker. ‘And open that Toblerone while you’re at it. I’m hungry.’
A few hours later, Ben strode into Ross Crankshaft’s offices at the London Enquirer to find his editor lurking in his dull grey office, reclining on a decrepit leather chair, his feet up on a utilitarian desk as he munched his way through what looked to be salmonella in a pie shell. On the walls were framed, yellowing front pages that he kept around, along with his unnecessarily tired and weary furnishings, to fool the public into believing he was an impoverished, hardworking martyr devoted to spreading the truth to the nation. Ben knew otherwise.
‘You summoned me, master,’ Ben spoke from the doorway before making his way to the desk and warmly shaking Ross’s hand. Out of respect for their long-standing friendship, he did his best to refrain from grimacing at the tomato sauce that had inadvertently been transferred in the process.
‘Ben, you bastard!’ Ross grouched, picking up his pie again and settling into his chair. His wrinkled white Oxford cloth shirt had pulled out of his suit pants but he didn’t bother to tuck it back in. ‘We should be doing this in a posh pub.’
‘At my expense, I bet.’ Ben shoved a pile of books off a cracked and battered Chesterfield before taking a seat. ‘What on earth have you been doing in here? It looks like hell after a nuclear holocaust. Suzy quit?’ He referred to Ross’s secretary of five years.
‘She left me.’ Ross’s expression turned morose.
‘A holiday, or eloping with someone with more hair?’ Ben ran his hand over his own head to take the sting out of the jibe. Ross had started going bald when he was twenty and now sported a clean-shaven pate that actually suited his mangled rugby player features, complete with off-centre nose, cauliflower ears and soulful blue eyes that never failed to impress the ladies.
‘Job over at the Daily Mail.’ Ross grimaced. ‘I’m still trying to replace her. Anyway, we’ll do the pleasantries later. Colin said you were strapped for time so I’ll get to the point.’
‘Is that possible?’ Ben feigned amazement as he propped an ankle on his knee and relaxed back in his chair.
Ross ignored him. ‘Your column last Saturday, about Alex Crane and that barber woman – what did you call her? Babyface? – has received incredible feedback. The readers loved her and, as usual, loved to stick it up you. Gave you a complete roasting in the Letters to the Editor and in the Comments this week, both in print and online. It was brilliant. I want you to do more.’
‘Oh?’ Ben scratched his cheek thoughtfully. ‘You mean as a sort of theme?’
‘Something like that. As long as they feature the little barber, or characters like her,’ Ross said with a decisive nod. ‘Given the reception you got we may be able to turn it into a money spinner later, a sort of tongue-in-cheek anti-travel book about Australia. What do you think?’
Ben shrugged, immediately liking the idea but not wanting to appear too keen. It never paid to have Ross think his ideas were good ones. ‘Might work.’
‘Will work.’ Ross thumped his desk emphatically. ‘Get cracking.’
‘That all?’ Ben asked with raised eyebrows.
‘No, actually, that was a side note. What I really want to talk to you about is an interview we’re running with your ex next week.’ Ross’s expression turned faintly apologetic.
Ben groaned. ‘Bloody hell, Ross. This has been going on for months. Hasn’t she milked the cash cow dry yet? There has to be more interesting material out there than me.’
‘Not with what she’s just come up with there’s not,’ Ross replied darkly, pushing a few printed pages towards Ben. ‘I said it at the time and I’ll say it again: a reality star? What the hell were you thinking? They’re so fame-hungry they’d shop their granny for lead story on the nightly news.’
‘I know.’ Ben picked the papers up off the desk. ‘I wasn’t thinking. Fit of insanity brought on by severe boredom and some pretty impressive cleavage.’ He scowled, his expression getting even darker as he began to read. By the time he got to the end of the page, he was cursing inventively.
‘She doesn’t say you did the last one, but all the others apply.’ Ross unsuccessfully tried to hide a smirk at his own joke. ‘Don’t worry about it, old man. It’ll be great press for that travel book you’re writing as of today.’
‘You’re as encouraging as ever.’ Ben stood.
‘You’re welcome,’ Ross said, not bothering to get up himself. He spoke again just as Ben reached the door. ‘Can you get me some duty-free single malt when you come back to London next?’
‘Bye, Ross.’
Ben boarded a British Airways flight back to Australia the next day. He settled himself down in the nearly empty first-class cabin and did his best not to brood. He was normally philosophical about travel, usually enjoyed it as a routine part of his life, but not this time around. If the news of his ex-girlfriend’s pending tell-all work of fiction hadn’t been bad enough, the meal he’d shared with his parents last evening iced the cake.
Having been deposited in boarding school at the tender age of five, Ben could honestly say that at thirty-three he didn’t know either of his parents any better than he knew the average man in the street. They were equally baffled by their genetic relation to him. Ben’s father, a member of the House of Lords and an ultra-conservative, frequently threatened to disown him over his often scathing comments about the government and the monarchy. His mother, a senior administrator at Imperial College in London, chose to deal with her progeny’s career by pretending it didn’t exist. Ben had the feeling that Celia Martindale frequently pretended that he didn’t exist too. He’d wondere
d idly over the years if that’s why there weren’t any childhood pictures of him in either of his parents’ country or London homes. He liked to think of himself as their dirty little family secret.
Years ago he’d decided that he couldn’t begrudge either his mother or his father; he owed them his entire career, after all. If it hadn’t been for their appalling child-rearing skills, he wouldn’t have been locked in that boarding school cupboard and developed the early ability to perform and entertain to fit into the cutthroat social hierarchy at school. That talent had led to numerous stand-up tours, several bestselling books, writing credits for three TV series, a weekly column and, if his friend Cameron and the Bright Star people had their way, a movie script. Not to mention a recent presence in the British tabloids that he’d rather not have at all.
He should have known better than to start a relationship with Marcella Black, but as he’d told Alex only the week before, she’d been like junk food: bland and generic but strangely addictive after the first bite. In that, she was nothing like Amy Blaine, his little Australian barber.
Requesting a Bloody Mary from a flirtatious flight attendant, he repressed a small half-smile, remembering his conversation with Amy that morning. He’d set his alarm for six and when it had gone off, he’d rolled over and reached for his phone before he’d even bothered to open his eyes, wondering the entire time if the lady was worth it. The breathless voice that answered the phone and his immediate rush of pleasure on hearing it told him yes, she certainly was.
She had sounded genuinely delighted to hear from him and even more delighted to agree to a mid-week dinner. In aid of advancing his cause, Ben had impulsively taken an hour out of negotiating with Bright Star to buy her a gift. With luck, it would achieve its purpose and the trip to London wouldn’t prove to have been an annoying nuisance after all.
AMY HADN’T STARTED her day intending to fall in love, but sometimes these things were simply inevitable. She stood in front of a concrete-floored wire mesh cage studying the object of her affection, who was currently wearing the most downcast expression she’d ever seen.
The Barbershop Girl Page 9