“You know it looks like you were trying to destroy evidence that might link you to the stalking don’t you Darla?” He turned to the young policeman, “your tea’s on the bench Paddy”.
“Yeah, I do, ” I said.
“Is there anyone who can vouch for your version of events last night?”
“My flatmate Anita. She’s visiting her Gran in Ashfield right now. I can give you the address and phone number if you like.”
“Yes please. Paddy, can you give Darla some paper to write those details down on?”
“Right here,” said Richmond who had sat down at the table with his tea. He passed me his notebook.
They watched as I wrote Grandma Bourne’s contact details down. It then occurred to me that another reason they were getting me to do this was because they needed a writing sample to compare with the letters Gordon had received from the stalker.
“Ok Darla,” said Warren, when I’d handed the notebook back to Officer Richmond. “We obviously need to talk to a few more people and we have a lot of things to check out so that’s all we need from you right now but I’m going to give you my card, it’s got my mobile number on it and I keep my phone with me 24/7 ok, I never turn it off. If you need me, for whatever reason, at any time, call me without any hesitation. Do you understand?”
I certainly did. He was talking about the stalker bitch that might be trying to get me.
“I’m going to have Officer Richmond here drop around a couple of times a day just to check for signs of intruders, as well as to make sure you’re ok.”
They both smiled at me in unison and I thought I was going to be sick. The more they tried to make me feel safe, the more vulnerable I felt. Scotty! All is forgiven! Beam me up damn you!
“Ok, there’s one other thing. You must not make any attempt to contact Gordon Worsley.”
I responded with a derisive snort.
“He thinks I’m capable of stalking and killing. I don’t have much to say to him right now.”
Warren put his hand over mine. The unexpected intimacy startled me.
“Darla, try to imagine the shock Gordon had. I think he loved that cat almost as much as he would a child. He has been under a huge amount of stress because of this; it’s probably a long way from being over and he hasn’t really had anywhere to channel his pain and fury. He lashed out at you because you were convenient. Sure, it’s not fair, well, that’s if you turn out to be innocent...”
I shot him a look. He ignored it and continued.
“...but raw emotion is rarely concerned with what’s fair.”
Chapter 40: Shopping & Fucking up
The woman walked up and down the aisles of the huge hardware store pushing a trolley. In the bottom of the trolley she’d already placed various ropes, rolls of electrical tape, scissors, gardening twine and two large bottles of methylated spirits. There were still a few more items on the shopping list. She needed a hammer, several screwdrivers and a glasscutter.
Humming to herself she pushed the trolley towards the tool section.
Chapter 41: Off to the Doc’s
It was an hour since the two policemen had let themselves out but I still hadn’t moved from the kitchen table when my mobile phone rang. From the number on the screen I could tell it was someone from the office.
“Hello?”
“Darla. It’s Arabella. Have the police finished with you?”
Great. What the hell did she want? Her voice was it’s usual clipped efficiency devoid of warmth but the fact that she’d called me herself spoke volumes. Arabella liked to distance herself as much as possible from her magazine minions so for her to be calling me meant she really wanted this story in the bag. This was as close as Arabella ever got to serious sucking up.
“Yes, they left not long ago.”
“Ok, good. Then I’m sending a cab round to your home, which will take you to your appointment with Dr Ferguson the cosmetic surgeon. It’ll be there in half an hour. You need to be there by 2pm. The driver will be given the address. Then take a cab home afterwards and claim it on expenses, ok.” Christ. The bloody makeover story. The last thing I needed right now was to have to worry about having extensive cosmetic surgery in the morning.
“Oh, and I’m going to send a few legal documents round in the cab too. I want you to sign them and give them back to the driver who’ll return them to me once he’s dropped you off.”
“Legal documents?”
“Yes, just a formality really. The documents will absolve the company and the magazine of any responsibility should something go wrong with your procedures. It just means you can’t sue us if things don’t work out as expected. You’d still be able to sue the surgeon though...” She paused realising this was probably not the best thing to be saying to someone who’s hours away from having her entire face and body remodelled with a knife by a total stranger.
“But don’t worry!” she soothed unconvincingly. “Absolutely nothing is going to go wrong. Dr Ferguson is the best in the business, he’s the one who did my eye lift.”
This was ridiculous.
“Arabella, I’m having a bit of a bad time right now, I don’t really want to go...” But it was no good, I was talking to a dial tone. She’d hung up.
Letting out a long sigh, I decided to go to the doctor’s appointment. It would be easier than ringing Arabella back, she probably wouldn’t take my call anyway, she’d have her assistant tell me that, ‘Ms Hamilton-Smythe had just that minute gone into a meeting’. Anyway, at least the surgery might take my mind off the whole stalker saga.
So I dragged myself away from the kitchen table to have a quick shower and change of clothes in the hope it would perk me up a bit. Twenty minutes later I emerged back in the kitchen, much fresher and in clean clothes but definitely no progress on the ‘perk’ front so I reverted to bad old habits and hit the biscuit tin with a vengeance while whipping up some unadulterated comfort food. By the time I heard the cab honking in the street, I’d inhaled six chocolate digestives and two doorstop sandwiches made from thick, white bread smothered in peanut butter, jam and cake sprinkles. Plus managed to watch a fair bit of Oprah Winfrey. It had been one of those ‘brilliant kids’ episodes where Oprah scours America for its most inspiring children, eight-year-olds who’ve worked out a plan to save the rainforest, ten year olds with their own companies manufacturing cutting edge software and some child genius who was at university at the age of six and is on the brink of discovering a cure for cancer. In their spare time all these kids do things like play violin in orchestras. It was enough to make your average 34 year old woman who couldn’t even change her own fuse when it blew, a little bit of an underachiever?
‘What have I done with my life?’ I thought as I went out to the cab, shoving the half finished packet of digestives into my bag to eat on the drive over. As I walked out the front door and over to the waiting cab, I noticed a guy waiting for a bus over the road. He was looking back at me, probably because we were the only two people in the street. He wasn’t very old but he was one of the fattest men I’d seen in a long time and it almost made me think twice about having another chocolate digestive. Almost.
“Hey,” said the driver as I shut the car door and put my seat belt on. He was from somewhere in Asia and could’ve been anywhere between 30 and 50 years old. I couldn’t really see his face but judging by the photo ID of him staring at me solemnly from the dashboard, he’d been driving cabs a very long time because in the photo he had seventies sideburns and the tips on the collar of his very loud shirt reached to his nipples.
“Hi.” I said, hoping he wasn’t one of those drivers who wanted to talk at me non-stop for the entire trip about whatever shite they’d just heard being spouted by some redneck, knee-jerk radio talkback host, or one of the hateful callers who couldn’t see why all those ‘bloody bludgers couldn’t be lined up and shot,’ or why all the ‘bloody foreigners taking jobs of good Aussie blokes couldn’t bloody well be sent back to where they came from’.
Invariably these callers began their vitriolic rants with phrases like, ‘I’m no racist but...’
Thankfully, after passing me the legal documents from Arabella, my driver was clearly about as interested in me as he was the splats of chewed gum on the pavement. I almost felt guilty for distracting him momentarily from the obviously hilarious conversation he was having with someone shedloads more interesting and amusing that me on his mobile phone.
I took the documents out of the yellow A4 envelope and started reading. About 20 seconds later I gave up, beaten into submission by sentences like, ‘in accordance with para. 7C (i) of subsection 12, which exempts Party A...’
“Fucking legalise bollocking jargon,” I muttered under my breath. But then, in the spirit of ‘Oh, what the hell,’ I took one of the seven pens that lived permanently at the bottom of my bag with a hair band, three lipsticks, and a condom thrown in there about three years ago in a (vainly) hopeful moment before a night at the pub, and started signing on the various dotted lines. Although, instead of D. Manners, I signed ‘Ima Mugg’. I would’ve bet my last Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup that Arabella wouldn’t look closely enough to notice and I’d be damned if I was going to give up the right to sue the company should anything go horribly wrong and I ended up looking like some chick who’d modelled for Picasso during his abstract period.
“Thanks,” I said, passing the envelope back to the driver who put it on the passenger seat next to him without missing a beat in his own conversation. For the rest of the trip, I tried not to think about things like scars, agonising pain, stalkers and flesh-sucking machines. I let my mind go blank and concentrated on the beautiful sights of Sydney that were whizzing past my window on this sky-blue summer day.
Chapter 42: ‘Just an inch of the sides thanks’
“Ms Manners?” said a woman in a voice of brandied honey and silk.
“Yes.”
“Hello, I’m Nurse Deirdra, I’ll be the one looking after you while you’re with us and I’ll be taking you through to see Dr Ferguson soon but if you don’t mind, I’ll just get you to fill out this little questionnaire before you go in, ok?”
Deirdra was a plump, attractive woman somewhere in her early thirties. She had a slight Scottish lilt to her voice, sparkling blue eyes and absurdly long black lashes, her skin was as smooth and white as cream and her lips were dark red cushions that even had me wondering what they’d be like to kiss. In contrast, her hair was thin and mousy and pulled back into a short ponytail that brought attention to the fact her ears stuck out a bit. I wondered why she hadn’t asked Dr Ferguson to sort those out for her and hoped it wasn’t like when someone worked in a restaurant and wouldn’t eat the food because they’d seen what went on behind the scenes.
Nurse Deirdra was wearing a dark blue nurse’s uniform, sensible black shoes over brown pantyhose and a white cardigan. Even though she was probably a year or two younger than me, I warmed to her in a maternal way, her chest was the kind that you wanted to call a ‘bosom’ and may as well have had a sign on it saying, ‘och, ye poor wee lamb, rest ye weary head here on me generous bosom, I’ll tek good care o’ ye’.
“Sure, thanks,” I said taking the five pages of questionnaire and clipboard from her extended hand. Twenty minutes later I had answered questions on everything from the date of my last period, childhood illnesses and the causes of death for my deceased grandparents. Nurse Deirdra came silently over on her sensible shoes just seconds after I’d put my pen down and begun looking around the room for the obligatory pile of magazines with a shyly smiling Princess Di on the cover from 1983. They weren’t there though; instead I could take my pick from any one of about 30 of the very latest quality glossy magazines, which were beautifully displayed on a long, glass table.
“Have you finished those questions Darla? That’s great, I’ll take that off you then,” she said, reaching for the questionnaire while I nodded dumbly.
She quickly checked through to see that I hadn’t missed anything.
“Lovely! Ok, would you like to follow me?”
With more dumb nodding, I picked up my bag and followed her out of the waiting room and down a carpeted corridor into a large room with a huge ornate oak desk in the centre. Behind the desk was a floor to ceiling bookshelf built into the wall, which was stuffed with medical texts. Covering all the other walls in the room were medical diagrams featuring various parts of the human body.
Pointing to the padded, leather chair in front of the desk, Deirdra asked me to sit down and relax because ‘Dr Ferguson would be along shortly’. She explained that she would be right with me throughout the whole thing and would stay in the room now while Dr Ferguson went through the various planned procedures with me. Just as I was once again nodding that I understood, a brisk, friendly bear of a man burst into the room smiling at us both as though nothing in the world could have given him more pleasure than finding two such treasures waiting in his office.
“Ms Manners!” He said with delight, stepping over to swallow my hand with his two giant paws and shake it vigorously up and down. “A pleasure to meet you! I’m Dr Ferguson, but please call me Hugh. I trust the lovely Nurse Deirdra has been looking after you?” He turned to her with a wink as he sat down in the leather upholstered chair behind the ocean of a desk.
“Yes, hi, thank you. Deirdra’s been great because, um, I’m quite, ah, nervous really...”
“Of course you are!” He said, throwing his hands briefly into the air before resting his forearms on the desk and leaning intently towards me.
“Nerves are only natural. This is a major operation Darla and should not be taken lightly. I’d have been concerned if you weren’t worried. But please, be reassured, I haven’t been sued yet and I’ve been in the business for 15 years so I’ve managed to get in plenty of practise at this stuff on other people so that I was ready for you,” he joked, beaming at me.
“Mmm. Yes, of course, right then,” I blathered.
Getting more serious, he said, “Now, I know we’re hurrying this whole thing along at the request of your bosses back at the magazine Darla but I want you to know that you can still talk to any of my recent clients if it would make you happier, you could call them tonight for a chat. I can give you the contact details for a number of women who’ve had similar work to you in the past six months. I will give you the details of one woman who was delighted with the results as well as at least one woman who was not so happy and who suffered complications. I do not want to give you the impression that what you’re about to do is risk free or guaranteed, ok?”
He looked at me waiting for a response and suddenly the seriousness of what I was getting into hit me like a speeding car into a brick wall. I was going to be wheeled into surgery in a shower cap and ugly gown with no back in it, rendered unconscious and cut open. The kindly man with the big eyebrows sitting in front of me would literally slice into my breasts, face, stomach and thighs; he would tug and pull at my skin and layers of muscle, cut away pieces of fat, place silicon sacs under by breasts, rearrange everything then sew me back together.
My stomach felt as though a writhing ball of vipers had somehow got in there. I tried to speak but my mouth was too dry for words to come out. I nodded yet again and licked my lips before giving speech another crack.
“Um, thanks Dr Ferguson, ah, I mean, Hugh. I will take those phone numbers off you and I’ll call those women to-tonight,” I stuttered then swallowed before continuing. “I know what you’re saying about how serious the procedure is and I can assure you that I am suitably terrified,” I pushed my face into what I hoped was a smile.
It must’ve worked. Dierdra and Hugh gave me full wattage smiles right back.
“Good. So long as you realise,” said Hugh. “Now! There’s a lot more for us to do before tomorrow. I need to examine you thoroughly and will need you to get undressed in a minute and you need to tell me exactly the kind of result you are after. As we go through, I’ll explain exactly what I’m going to be doing and I’ll tel
l you the kind of things that can go wrong. Also, you need to understand that you won’t be jumping out of bed in a day or so. Total recovery can take months and in the first couple of weeks you’ll be spending a lot of time in bed and in pain. Although of course we’ll alleviate the pain as much as possible with plenty of drugs.”
I took a deep breath and nodded again. Lots of drugs were fine by me. New me, here I come.
“Marvellous! Lets get started then.”
And over the next two hours, Hugh and Deirdra scrutinised every inch of my body as I told them where I wanted to be thinner, firmer and higher. When it was finally time to get in the cab and go home I was exhausted, scared and excited.
The one upshot to being beside myself over the surgery thing was that I’d had no time to be beside myself over the whole Gordon/psychobitch/possible jail term thing.
‘At least I’d be an attractive inmate,’ I thought as the cab bolted up Oxford St but then it dawned on me just how unfortunate being an attractive woman in a women’s prison could be.
Chapter 43: Getting In
The woman was totally focused on what she was doing. Standing on a ladder outside a second storey window at the back of the terrace house, she was firmly cutting a circle in the windowpane. Then, wrapping a thick towel around her fist, she pushed on the glass circle until it fell almost noiselessly onto the carpet of the room on the other side.
Smiling, she unwrapped her fist and reached through the hole to undo the latch before raising the window as far as it would go. With the window open, the woman threw the glasscutter and the towel into the room, aiming for the middle of the double bed, which was positioned just a few inches away from the wall to the right of the window. Both objects landed in the middle of the thick blue doona. Next, carefully taking her right foot off the ladder, she put her leg through the window and pulled herself onto the window ledge. Jiggling herself round so that she was straddling the ledge, she pushed her head down to squeeze under the window then let herself fall through and onto the carpet. It hadn’t been far to fall but it still hurt a bit and she lay there to let the pain subside
The Year I Went Pear-shaped: A fat woman's tale of love and insanity Page 17