The Little Clothes E-Book

Deborah Callaghan

• Herausgeber: Bedford Square Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 358

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Introducing Audrey Mendes, a clever thirty-eight-year-old lawyer caught in a web of toxic situations, whose past gets pulled out into the light. Audrey is tired of not being seen. Not seen by her mother, who always preferred her golden brother. By her sleazy boss, who works her to the bone, without reward or recognition. By her self-obsessed colleagues, who want her to help them fix their lives without any acknowledgement of her own. Her social life consists of late nights in the office, visits to her ageing parents, trivia nights with a group of relative strangers, and evenings at home with her pet rabbit Joni. One night, unable to get the attention of the bartender in her local, she walks out without paying for her wine. This small rebellion leads to another, and more. Liberated by her invisibility, Audrey wreaks havoc in the lives of her friends and workmates. Until a painful reminder from the past pushes her into a reckoning, and things really start to spiral out of control.

Leseprobe

To Joc and Don

A baby born in a cup of tea

Sailed the rim on the back of a bee

When the tea was drunk

And the leaves were read

The bee had drowned

And the baby was dead

Grandma Joan

Chapter 1

Audrey Mendes caught a bus from the ferry wharf to the first strip of small shops. Candles, homewares and whatnot. She sometimes trudged up the sharp rising hill towards the western sun, past the Victorian terraces that had been renovated in the eighties when it was fashionable to expose the porous bricks, but mostly she didn’t, and not today, although she worried she should have. She could feel the band of fat from belly to hips when she leaned forward to the cramped space behind the seat in front to stuff her jacket into her gym bag, remembering with some regret the medium pasta salad she’d eaten from a plastic tub while working through lunch. That she carried the heavy bag containing her cosmetics, little-used runners and a lightly edited novel into the city five days a week could surely be counted as exercise.

•

At the pub she chose two bottles of white wine from the fridge and waited at the corner counter next to the long bar where people had begun to order beers and settle. The banter had started.

‘Mate, did ya see the game?’

‘Yeah mate, whatta game!’

Another game was playing at full volume on the screen in the next room. Audrey could see people in there drinking with Friday-night abandon. One of the bartenders came near and she waved. A little wave, granted. He didn’t see her. He picked up a phone from the back of the bar and started texting. He picked up a second phone and texted. He picked up a third phone and texted. It was as if he was shuffling cards, such was his sleight. And Audrey waited. She was sure that when he finished fiddling with the phones, he’d serve her. It was gloomy in the pub, she excused him, and it was hard to be seen in the small alcove to the side of the long bar. And she was short, even in her heels, and the bottle-shop cash register blocked her face. The music was loud. A young woman with crimson dreadlocks and deep dimples, also tending the bar, joked with the man who had three phones. Another bartender, sporting a bun on top of his partially shaved head and a tightly plaited beard with a tinkling bell on its point, said something and they all laughed explosively, parted and strutted. Audrey waved larger this time. No one came.

‘Hello!’ she said in a too-loud voice. ‘Hello! Can I please get some service?’

She watched others being served at the long bar. A young man was offered a tasting of craft beer, a new brand from Marrickville. Audrey could hear the bar staff telling the slight but apparently riveting story of Manmaid, a microbrewery startup involving twin brothers Leo and Levi, an abandoned garage and a small loan that might one day lead to imagined riches. The customer screwed up his face in disgust. The beer wasn’t to his liking. It most certainly was not! He turned to his female companion and expressed his thorough disapproval by twisting his lips and sticking out his tongue stiffly. He was affronted. A second tasting of a different brand was poured to test his fine palate. The bar staff huddled, waiting on a verdict.

‘Hello!’

Audrey waved again, this time in half circles almost as wide as a small sedan windscreen. No one turned to her. Still, she waited. She was a polite person but when she had excused them for long enough Audrey became irritated. After another few minutes she put one bottle on top of the jacket in her gym bag and the other in her handbag, and started to walk out of the pub. Past the manager who sometimes called her love when she smiled at him in the local supermarket. The manager who, with his wife, was raising his daughter in his place of work. He turned as Audrey left. The pudgy child was trying to press buttons on a solitary poker machine by standing on her toes and slapping her flat hand high above her head. Here we go, thought Audrey, he’s seen me.

‘See ya, love.’

She smiled tightly at the young father, who was wearing a trucker cap inside and backwards.

One block and a few houses up, Audrey put her bags down on her verandah and walked back to the street to see if she had been followed. The street was empty except for her neighbours, who were tinkering with their car, bonnet up. She had thought of them as the amiable village idiots since they had trick or treated on Halloween among the throng of neighbourhood children. Roy and his son Troy were dressed in party-shop Batman and Robin suits and she’d given them each a mini Mars bar from her generous basket of lollies. Audrey had been dressed up too. A crone in greenface.

Now she shut her front door, clomped down the hall to the kitchen, twisted the top off a bottle, poured herself a glass and kicked off the bloody high heels she wore to court when she accompanied the men to help keep track of their books, manila folders, trolleys and coffee orders.

After twenty minutes, she started to wonder if there were security cameras in the pub. She didn’t think so. The police had knocked on the door when she first bought her house. There had been a residential break and enter a few doors down, at number 83.

‘Go to the pub,’ she advised the two young uniforms. ‘They’ll have cameras there.’

‘They don’t. We checked there first.’

‘Oh, well, you’d think they would. Being a business. Especially round here.’

‘If you hear of anything or remember any suspicious activity from the last few days, please call this number.’ They handed Audrey a card and pocketed their notebooks.

‘I will. Hope you catch them.’

They left through Audrey’s wonky gate, already alert to lifting rather than swinging it, their hips swaying under the weight of their cumbersome weaponry. Guns, batons, pepper spray, handcuffs.

Yet maybe there were cameras now installed at the pub. The new owners had taken over just five months ago, keeping the managers on but permanently removing the seafood pie from the menu. She’d have to explain her actions to the police who would knock on her door at any minute. She’d be struck off. Who would employ her now? How would she explain her behaviour to her parents, who would be disappointed in their surviving child? Their thirty-eight-year-old single daughter. The lawyer. There was no knock on the door, but she was unsettled and decided to go to the pub to buy another bottle. Perhaps take one bottle back in her handbag. She couldn’t take the already opened bottle, though she briefly considered filling it to the top with water. No. Stupid! But how to pay for three bottles when she’d only have two?

In the pub Audrey chose another bottle and put it on the counter next to the stolen bottle. She waved.

‘Hello!’

She waited. The bar was hectic now and the staff moving with purpose.

‘Hi, can I get some service please?’

Customers streamed in and stood in ragged lines at the long bar. They had all the attention.

‘Hello, can I please get some service?’

No one turned. No one glanced in Audrey’s direction. She considered taking the bottles to the bar but the sign said not to. Purchase all bottle shop items in the bottle shop. NOT in the bar. NOT was underlined three times.

‘Hello! I am now leaving and walking out with two bottles of wine,’ she yelled. ‘I’m leaving!’

And so she did. Back at home Audrey again waited for the knock on the door as she sat at the kitchen table looking at the three stolen bottles. She was discomforted and cranky. Resentful. She felt she’d been forced into an awkward position. By 9.30 she had stopped worrying and was playing Words With Friends with strangers, scrolling Instagram, and watching Ozark on Netflix.

•

Audrey wasn’t sure where she was when she woke thirsty in the morning. Her throat was sore. Had she been snoring? She thought for a moment that she was in the office and had worn her owl pyjamas to work. Still clutching at the wisp of a receding dream, she sat up and saw an empty bottle on her coffee table, standing tall above an icecream bucket. She remembered the sketchy details of the previous evening. Maybe there were cameras in the pub and everyone knew what she’d done – but perhaps they thought she was as crazy as one of the unhinged meth addicts from the housing commission blocks around the corner. Just the same. Crimes, she thought, big and small, were a leveller.

Although the bottle shop opened at 10.00 a.m., Audrey decided to wait until it would be more appropriate to buy wine on a Saturday morning. When would that be? She watered the parched succulents, snipped chives from her garden for butter-heavy scrambled eggs, fed Joni a carrot and changed the hay, opened the bills, and read the gossip page in the newspaper.

Audrey had bought the dilapidated worker’s cottage with the inheritance from her brother, Henry. A few years on she’d made some changes. Landscaping at the front and back. A new gate. ‘A lot of money for a lot of white pebbles,’ her mother had said when Rita and Eustace came to dinner and a showing. Recently Audrey had added a sleek custom-built wardrobe to the spare bedroom. Its soft-closing drawers, multi-tiered hanging spaces and pull-out shoe and accessories trays were a salve. This morning she didn’t go into the spare room, but she could smell it. As enticing as a new car or just-baked cake. Fresh paint, wood and polish.

•

The pub was swampy at eleven. Two young men in black T-shirts, black jeans and ivory bum cracks were clearing the debris from the night before. There was a large wooden tray of hamburger buns and a box of waxy potatoes on the long counter. A keg was being rolled in and tapped. The drone of a leaf blower could be heard from the cheerless beer garden – a mossy place that served equally for milestone birthdays and wakes. The television was resting. The bar fly had not yet claimed his stool.

Audrey chose two more bottles of wine from a now sparsely stocked fridge. There was another job neglected, she thought. She went again to the small side counter and cleared her throat. The manager walked behind the main bar.

‘Just these two, love?’

‘Yes, but I was only charged for one of these yesterday instead of four.’

‘Don’t worry about it, love.’

‘No, I want to pay.’

‘So, you want me to charge you for four of these and one of those?’

‘Yes please.’

‘Okay.’

Audrey tapped her card with relief.

‘Have a great day, love.’

‘You too.’

The little girl ran to her father as he walked from behind the counter, squealing when he tossed her onto his bulging shoulder and started picking up glasses with his free hand.

‘Bye, love.’

‘She’s growing up.’

‘Yeah, three and a half next week. See ya, love.’

Audrey recalled the muted organic cot blanket and mauve toy elephant she’d chosen and wrapped so carefully in cream tissue with a tea-stain calico ribbon when Shay-Lee was born. The child’s name now indelibly inked: Shay on the father’s left forearm, and Lee on the mother’s right bicep. The father would drape his arms round the mother’s shoulders so the tattoos aligned and could be read in the right order by interested customers.

Audrey’s gift had not been acknowledged even though she saw the parents most Tuesdays on Trivia Night, when an assortment of nodding neighbours took a table together. She remembered with irritation how Tom had brought his friend Elspeth with him last week without consulting the group, and how she hadn’t known anything. They’d tried to be inclusive and made her their scribe, but she’d written Ireland as I-land and Audrey’s namesake Tautou as Tattoo. Audrey had barely refrained from grabbing the pen. Elspeth hadn’t eaten because there was nothing vegan on the menu, even in the vegan section.

‘It’s not really vegan, or even vegetarian. They use the same vat of oil for the fish and chips that they use for the mushroom arancini and zucchini flowers,’ she said. Audrey tried to look attentive to the details of the vegetarian menu, a page to which she never strayed.

The cross-contamination on the grill, the virtues of canola, avocado and coconut oil and the problems of insufficiently cleaned processing and cooking equipment were all tabled. Every few minutes Audrey nibbled apologetically at her congealing chicken burger and was signalled twice by Marion that she had mayonnaise on her chin. She was relieved when the quiz started. But only after they had suffered Elspeth’s exposition on orange wine, the only drop that would pass her perfect plump lips.

•

This afternoon there was another baby to celebrate. Audrey didn’t want to attend Erin’s baby shower. She’d said yes, of course, grateful to be invited, and less concerned by what advantage the others in the office might gain from going than how it might appear if she was the only one not to go, and now she really couldn’t think of a polite or credible way out of the obligation this close to the event. Her mother couldn’t be sick again. It would be like cursing Rita. The plumber, mechanic and electrician had been invoked too often. Audrey planned to go back into the pub after the baby shower to check again for possible cameras, but was also keenly aware that the guilty often return to the scene of their crime. Still, it would be much busier later and she knew it was unlikely she would be noticed as she peered at the cornices and corners.

•

‘Audrey! Come in!’ Heidi, the new assistant in HR, momentarily unrecognisable out of the office and her navy suit, greeted her.

‘You’re just in time for Playdough Baby. Also, grab an ice baby and put it in your glass. Go and get a drink over there. You have to catch up! The first one to melt their ice baby has to yell “My water broke!” Hilarious, right! Ours are almost melted so you might not win that one. We’re all making a baby out of playdough. Just take a ball of dough. Any colour, although I think only white is left. Still, more realistic, right?’

‘Not for everyone.’

‘Oh god, Audrey, that’s hilarious. Everyone’s told me how funny you are. I’ve heard so many stories. When you’re finished, put the baby in a cupcake holder. Make sure you put your name under the cupcake case first so we know whose is whose. The cutest one wins. Alec’s going to judge them when he gets back from golf! Put your present on the table out there.’

Heidi, Audrey thought, should have been in hi-vis, holding airport runway paddles or AFL umpire flags. So many rules and instructions.

There was a ziggurat of gifts balanced on the table in the entrance like a late-stage game of Jenga. This was Erin’s second baby shower since the wedding and before that there’d been the engagement party when the affair with Alec – a senior partner and married father of five mostly grown-up children – had finally been unveiled. They’d all suspected after the Law Society Ball, of course. Then came the unequivocal and bitter email sent to the whole company from Alec’s wife, Vivienne, who didn’t hold back. She had outed the new couple to a point where even sympathetic recipients found some of the details unnecessary. Audrey waited a hellish two months for a second salvo from Vivienne that never came. Perhaps she had no inkling about Audrey. Perhaps she didn’t care. Vivienne was a remote figure. The elegant wife who didn’t make her husband happy. Whenever Vivienne called Alec, ‘Psycho Killer’ started to play. In the first flush of her own entanglement with Alec, Audrey found the laddish joke very funny.

The engagement had been closely followed by a hens’ night in a city club, where all the support crew wore tiaras that identified them, in cut-out plastic letters, as friend of bride. The stripper had been an embarrassment. Most of the women shimmied with Andre. Audrey did not shimmy and unfortunately found herself the centre of attention, urged on by a chorus of cries to step up and join in. She sat in her chair, resolute, even as Andre straddled her lap to everyone’s amusement.

Erin held a spectacular first birthday party for Carter that Audrey managed to dodge because of the clash with her own birthday dinner arranged by her parents. Erin’s bespoke invitations arrived with alarming regularity. There had even been a hastily planned wake for Boxy, allocated to Alec in the divorce. The yellowing dog lay in an open cardboard container in front of an arrangement of candles and incense suggestive of a spirituality that Audrey silently questioned.

Gifts were bought. Tickets and hotels booked. Clothes decided upon. Themed thank-you cards without personal messages followed. Did they like the pewter ice bucket? Well of course they did, Audrey reassured herself, they’d put it on their list. But did they know it was from her?

The destination wedding in Tahiti over three days had practically drained Audrey’s savings along with a week of annual leave. She spent too much time in her bungalow in a panic. It was difficult walking alone into a room of partying couples. The worst moment was being the last to arrive after the four-hour photo-furlough between wedding and reception, and teetering in new block-heeled sandals in front of the other guests, who were all barefoot and loose. Audrey hid in her room after the beach ceremony, occasionally peeping out into the walkways to see what was happening and if the other guests were also in their bungalows. It was so quiet she was nervous. Had she missed some of the instructions? Later she found out most of the guests had gone to a spontaneous party in the resort bar where friendships had been formed. Alec’s mother, the grand dame, sat on a high-backed rattan chair at the reception and received those who dared go near. Audrey did not dare. Her tropical-patterned clothes, chosen with such care, were now in unfortunate contrast with the subtle linens and pastels worn by Erin’s younger friends and those of her newly minted mother-in-law.

‘Wow, Audrey, you look very bright, very Tahitian!’

•

‘Audrey, darling, come in. You’re late!’

Now Erin was propped in the corner of the denim couch with her legs crossed, her slightly protruding belly nestled neatly in her lap. She reached one arm above her head and hooked it like a coat hanger around Audrey’s neck. Audrey leaned down and obediently pecked Erin on the head.

‘Look at me! I’m enormous!’

‘Not really. You’ll never be enormous. If I didn’t know you are pregnant, I wouldn’t know. If you know what I mean.’

Audrey was trained early in reassuring others about their weight.

‘You are so sweet, Aud.’

‘Not really.’

‘God, you’re funny. Have you got a drink? I wish I could have one.’

Audrey clinked her ice-baby caipiroska against Erin’s mineral water.

The bridesmaids were hovering and shrilling, and Erin’s mother, coolly elegant in Akira, was reading to Carter, instructing him in a slightly raised voice, ‘Tell Granny Sue how many flamingos. Let’s count them together.’

Alec arrived well after four and held court, as he did in the office. Audrey retreated to the bathroom. The tiled sanctuary was decorated like a spa, with the only light coming from a bank of votives. Who had the time to light so many votives? Well, Erin, obviously. Elegant dark-bottled toiletries and stacked linen-look paper handtowels lined the limestone bench. Gardenias cut from the garden were haphazardly bunched in vintage lead crystal vases. Audrey looked at herself in the mirror with anticipated disappointment. Must get to the gym more often, she thought. She washed her hands with Erin’s fragrant pump soap. Cucumber and patchouli, oils of Africa, fungi from ancient forest floors. Paraben free. She dropped the handtowel into the woven Ikea wastebasket beneath the bench and then scrunched up three more clean handtowels and threw them in too.

When Audrey walked back into the party, Alec was judging the playdough babies. Had he put a rinse through his hair? All the women were attentive. Laughing ostentatiously. He wasn’t saying anything that clever. Nothing to warrant the congregated fawning. Audrey thought Erin was the clever one. She had left the office and her work as a junior administrative assistant when she married Alec and started her own curated boutique line of sandals. Erin had given each of the female wedding guests a pair of her beaded slides, Shore Print, in diaphanous bags that had been placed on their beds in Tahiti. Audrey’s navy raffia with silver beads were too small, yet she was thrilled to receive them and didn’t want to upset Erin by asking for a different size. There were other goodies in a canvas welcome bag that was printed with a sepia photo of Alec and Erin. Miniature bottles of Krug Grande Cuvée, Panadol, palm-shaped chocolates, sunscreen, and a leather luggage tag stamped with the dates of the nuptial extravaganza. Who wouldn’t want to be reminded of this event every time they went on a lesser holiday? And a lavish brochure outlining the three days of activities bookending the wedding, illustrated with more photos of Erin and Alec. The welcome cocktails, a tour of the pearl farm, the culinary adventure at the local market, the drinks party on a yacht at dusk, the recovery barbecue on the long, wide jetty, an open-top classic Land Rover circumference of the island, an eco-tour of the mangroves, and guided reef snorkelling, all enthusiastically described and encouraged above a discreet small-print mention of the extra costs for private and personal choices.

Alec and Erin arrived at their wedding on palanquins and were greeted as if they were rock stars, royalty, or Instagram influencers.

At the recovery party, almost everyone was tossed into the turquoise waters. Audrey was not. She did not want to be tossed, but she wondered why she wasn’t.

Alec chartered a plane to take the wedding guests back to Sydney at the end of the celebrations. Audrey commented that Erin and Alec would lose all their friends and family in one fell swoop if the plane went down.

‘They’d have to go to so many funerals.’

‘Audrey, that is the most tasteless comment I’ve ever heard,’ said HR Nadine from across the aisle. ‘You have no filter.’

‘I thought the same thing as her. It seems silly to put all your eggs in one basket,’ said an uncle standing in the aisle, waiting for the toilet to be vacated.

Later, Erin agreed. ‘I did think about it. I was going to drown myself in the resort swimming pool if the plane crashed.’

•

‘I think I’ll have to go for this one,’ Alec announced, picking up a playdough baby. There were squeals when it was revealed to be Erin’s. ‘Well, she is very good at making babies,’ he said, leering at his young wife.

‘Go to Daddy.’ Granny Sue pushed her grandson forward as a foil, seeking her own little bit of the limelight.

‘Aaaawww, how cute,’ the women cooed in unison as Alec reached down and ruffled his youngest child’s lightly gelled hair.

‘We’re the only men here, son. We have to stick together.’

Everyone laughed again.

Audrey skulked around the walls and the fringes of others’ conversations for twenty more minutes. Alec waved to her with the tips of his fingers when they accidentally made eye contact. She again fled to the bathroom and while there took her time to drip the liquid soap, Krasner style, over the limestone bench, before putting the bottle in the clown patch pocket of her Lee Mathews smock. She peered into the drawers. Erin had lovely handtowels and room spray ready for use. Audrey resolved to buy some small luxuries for her own bathroom and to tidy her shamefully cluttered and stained medicine cabinet. After five minutes someone rapped on the door. It was Granny Sue and Carter.

‘Why aren’t you joining in the games?’

‘Fat poo-head!’ Carter shrieked. Sue shushed him down.

‘This is how you were in Tahiti! Why don’t you mix in? My daughter tells me you’re very funny. I can’t tell.’

‘Oh, just not feeling the best.’

‘That’s what you said then. Is it irritable bowel? You’re always in the bathroom. I can refer you to my doctor. He’s fabulous. He’s a GP but he’s also a naturopath and a reiki healer. Exceptionally gentle hands. His name is Tone. He fixed my scalenes in just three sessions with dry needling. He’ll even do a filler or two. He doesn’t take on new patients, but I can get you in.’

‘Thanks, Sue. But I already have a GP. By the way, it’s not irritable bowel.’

‘Gluten intolerance?’

‘No! I’m just shy!’

‘What? What did you say? I couldn’t hear you just then above the noise. The music is way too loud.’

‘I said goodbye. And Carter, I’m sure Granny Sue wouldn’t want you to be quite so rude to your mother’s guests. Maybe too much sugar, Sue? By the way, there’s no soap in there and a bit of a mess on the bench. You might want to take soap in for Carter’s hands.’ And his mouth.

‘That can’t be true. I dressed the bathroom myself.’ Sue hurried into the glowing chamber, the remnants of her grandson’s squashed blue-iced cupcake on the back of her red silk tunic.

Audrey was the first to leave. A grazing board the size of a small meadow had long since relaxed. The melange of nitrate-infused meats, dips, cheeses and dried fruits a fleeting table-to-bin amusement. Thank goodness it had been photographed and posted when it was fresh and the individual components discernible and likeable. No one saw Audrey go. They were all playing pin the nappy on the baby, groping towards the wall when it was their turn, eyes covered with one of Alec’s ties, arms outstretched, being guided back on course by the onlookers. In the foyer, Audrey took a Tiffany bag from the present table and kept moving seamlessly out the front door of the faux Hamptons villa and into her waiting Uber.

•

At home, Audrey opened the card from the stolen gift bag.

Love you so much girl. Your the coolest mommy ever you slay life I wouldn’t of survived without you. Thank you for being there for all the times we’ve lived our best lives and also through the shit that we’ve survived together lmao. Only we know. I am so so happy that you will be a mommy again because Im your sister from another mister and that makes me an auntie two times hahah love you, Hanny XXXX. PS. Your my BFFL forever. PPS. Goddess.

What the hell? thought Audrey. Hanna! Recently promoted to junior partner Hanna. She’d confided in Audrey just months ago that she found Erin and Alec unbearable. She’d cried at the Marble Bar while Audrey bought the drinks. Thank god Audrey hadn’t told Hanna about Alec and his nocturnal visits to her house when he was still married to Vivienne.

Audrey had gone to Nadine in HR in a frenzy of embarrassing tears, deep breaths and a barely suppressed flinty anger.

‘I am way more experienced. I am older, I have worked here longer, I worked on Gilchrist and Aziz. I actually ran that case. Both trials. Now it’s quoted everywhere as our great success. I wouldn’t mind seeing how many new clients came out of that case. Which I ran for two years! More than two years!’

‘Calm down, Audrey. Or come back when you are calm. And make an appointment next time. I’m busy and cannot anticipate or attend to your every grievance.’

‘What do you mean by that? I never complain.’

‘I wouldn’t say never.’

‘Fine. This’ll take a minute. Tell me why. Why didn’t I make partner?’

‘Do you really want to know? The truth?’

‘Yes, I do. That’s why I’m here making an idiot of myself.’

‘You’re not considered a team player, Audrey.’

‘I work longer and harder than anyone.’

‘But not on the team.’

‘Who is the team?’

‘Come on, Audrey, you know what I’m talking about.’

‘No, I don’t. Give me an example of my not being a team player. Whatever that is.’

Nadine rolled her eyes. As if she had a long list to choose from. Which she didn’t. Audrey Mendes was accommodating. Often browbeaten.

‘Well, the photo session for the brochure, for a start.’

‘The what? The photo session? What do you mean?’

‘The company spent a lot of time and money securing the location for the photoshoot. Everyone was dressed and styled. You got hair and make-up. The clothes. Like everyone else. You actually looked quite nice. Everyone else thought it was fun but you mocked it. Someone had to organise all of that. It didn’t just happen. My girls were here till midnight the night before.’

‘God, Nadine, the brochure was a team-building exercise? Really? You believe that? The brochure was to promote the company. We non-partners were the unpaid models. And as if we don’t all work till midnight and later when we have to. You and I are usually the last ones here. How many times have we turned off the lights together? I hardly think posing in hired clothes in someone else’s glamorous office constitutes working. We’re actually here to work as lawyers to help people through the legal system, then we charge them a whole lot of money because they can’t do what we do and they are terrified of what might happen to them.’

‘Audrey, do you really think you were an unpaid model? Why would they pick you for that? And don’t you lecture me about lawyers and what we do. I have my law degree too and practised here before you started. Here’s my personal advice, with my professional hat off, as a friend, Audrey – if you want to be in the boardroom, act like you want to be there, and go when you’re invited. Show some respect to the people who control the boardroom.’

‘Don’t you control the boardroom?’

‘What? Don’t be sarcastic, Audrey. Don’t even start.’

‘But don’t you? Control the boardroom, I mean? I’ve never been able to book it without your permission. You keep that green diary of the times for all the rooms.’

‘Someone has to organise things, Audrey. Do you think coordinating the bookings is easy?’

Audrey thought it was probably fairly easy.

Nadine pushed back from her desk and Audrey marvelled again at how her bob was more helmet than hair: a blunt cut grazing her chin and framing the slash of red lipstick and heavily mascaraed lashes. Sitting on an ergonomic chair in a spacious corner office overlooking Hyde Park. Carla Zampatti suit. Trembling hands betraying her. Photographs adorned the walls and shelves with dedications of love for Nadine from celebrity clients. Rascally politicians and the like. Many of whom Audrey had defended from her own partitioned workspace near a kitchenette on a lower floor.

‘But what about my work? My record of work? I have been a team player. I’ve won many cases for our clients. The clients like me.’

‘There you go, Audrey. Right there.’

‘I don’t even know what you’re saying.’

‘You have won cases? The clients like you? Grow up, Audrey. No one gives fuck-diddly-squat about what you did for which case. We are a team. We are not islands unto ourselves.’

Audrey was momentarily taken aback by Nadine’s quote. Had she been reading?

‘But I did win cases. I wrote the documents. I proposed the way through. I did do it with the team. I worked long hours well past midnight when the others went off to dinner. I did it. They almost never asked me to join them. Even when we were working as a team!’

The diners weaved noisily back into the office one night and gave Audrey a grease-spotted paper bag from Golden Century.

‘Here you go, Aud,’ Richard said, plonking the unwanted offering on her desk. ‘We over-ordered. The dim sum is pretty strong but there’s also a bit of sweet and sour pork and something green that no one ate. Still, you don’t look like a greens girl to me. Come and join us in the boardroom for a drink before you hook into that.’

‘Thanks, Richard, but I’ve already eaten and I have work to do.’

‘Oh, come on, Aud, lighten up. Join us for a drink.’

Audrey had gone to the boardroom hating herself, but gratefully accepted a glass of warm wine with ice cubes after it was discovered the bar fridge had been turned off at least a day before.

‘Fucking cleaner. I’ve told them not to unplug the fucking fridge for the vacuum,’ said Alec. ‘Probably didn’t understand what I was saying. This is what happens when you let the peasants in. So, Audrey, what have you been doing all evening that held you back from joining us?’

‘I had work to do. And I wasn’t invited. My father is one of the peasants, by the way, so that probably explains the no invitation thing.’

‘What are you working on?’

‘You know what I’m working on because you asked me to do it.’

‘Audrey, you are, if nothing else, funny.’

‘Well at least I’m something.’

‘I am going to have to ask you to leave, Audrey,’ Nadine said now in a studied manner, shuffling and restacking her folders, paint charts, travel brochures and magazines. ‘We can talk again later. I hope to see you at drinks for Hanna and Daniel tonight. In the boardroom. My advice, for what it’s worth, is that you go to the drinks. And if you do decide to go, try to find your way there on time and congratulate the new junior partners. Unkindness does not become you.’

•

Inside the pilfered Tiffany box was a miniature silver comb with a delicate pink silk tassel. Ridiculous, Audrey thought. And then, It must be a girl! And then, Erin told Hanna it was a girl. Audrey felt she’d done so much better with her French linen cot set and giraffe rattle. Yet she hadn’t been let in on the secret. She also wondered if Alec had told Erin about the affair. Was it even an affair? Why exactly had she allowed Alec to come to her house so many times? Why had she always welcomed him in, poured his favourite wine that she’d hunted down and refrigerated to the right temperature, and then not objected when he left her less than two hours later? Why did she think she loved him when he flipped her onto her belly, pulled her to her knees and shoved himself in?

‘Can we talk, Alec?’

‘About what? You know I can’t give you a raise.’

‘Us. About us.’

‘I’m sorry, Aud, I’m not sure what you’re getting at, and I have to be home forty minutes ago. Vivienne thinks I’m at a meeting. Maybe later in the week? Maybe we can have lunch at Machiavelli? The house pasta. You like that, don’t you? I’ve seen you polish it off more than once.’

‘Well, we’d have to be very careful. Those walls have ears. And eyes.’

‘Trust me, Aud, no one would ever suspect us. Have you seen Vivienne?’

•

Back in the pub, Audrey plucked a bottle from the fridge almost without looking. Any bottle would do. Her purpose was to crane again in all directions looking for cameras. She couldn’t see any. The nightmare of the wine was surely over.

‘What are you up to, Audrey?’ Standing at the long bar and smiling across at her was trivia-night Lorraine. ‘You’re looking suspicious! What on earth are you doing?’

Audrey laughed brightly.

‘Have you ever looked at these gorgeous decorative tin ceilings? I’m just getting my Saturday-night supplies! Trust me, I’m not interesting enough to be suspicious.’

‘True. But come and join us. We’re just over there. What will you have?’

Audrey, shorter now in Birkenstocks but still in her tiered Lee Mathews smock, peered around the till and into the main bar. Marion, Sean, Jeff, Tom and Elspeth were sitting at two cocktail tables. The group met on non-trivia nights? Without her?

‘I don’t want to intrude.’

‘What are you talking about? Intrude? You won’t be intruding. We just ran into each other. You are funny. I’m buying. What will you have?’

‘Okay. Just one. A sav blanc. I’ve been out all afternoon. So just one quick one. I’ll pay for this and come over.’

‘Look everyone, it’s Audrey!’ Lorraine announced Audrey’s arrival at the table as if she might not otherwise be seen or recognised.

‘You sit here, Aud,’ said Sean, offering his stool and going in search of another.

‘Hi everyone. Hope I’m not interrupting anything.’

‘Noooo,’ they chorused. ‘We just bumped into each other. So funny you’re here too. What are the chances?’ Audrey thought the chances were pretty good since they all lived in the neighbourhood and frequented the pub.

She was jolted to see Tom’s hand on Elspeth’s knee. A bony young knee. What had she been thinking – that he might be interested in her? In Audrey, plump and plain. Older. Had he amused them with the story of the cake she’d taken to his house one Saturday afternoon?

‘Audrey!’ he had said. ‘What are you doing here? This is a surprise. Wow, I didn’t know you knew where I live. Is everything okay?’

‘I saw you come here once when I was helping look for a missing cat. Anyway, I was just experimenting and made an extra cake. It’s a mandarin sponge. I grow mandarins. I have a tree. My parents have one too. So, I end up with a lot of mandarins. Thus, the cake. I’ve also made jam. You don’t have to take it – the cake. But there is jam if you don’t want the cake. But you don’t have to take the jam either.’

‘Oh, Audrey, that’s very kind. Look, the thing is, I’m a bit busy at the moment.’

Tom, in a too-small vintage Mexico Games T-shirt and smiling hippopotamus boxer shorts, had left the front door three-quarters closed behind him and kept running his hand through his messy hair. His beautiful messy hair. Audrey barely resisted brushing a dirty blond lock from his eye.

‘Well, you really don’t have to take it. I can give it to Wanda on the corner. I just thought I’d offer it to you first since you’re closer.’

Dumb, she immediately thought. There were so many winding stairs to Tom’s house she was still out of breath from the climb.

‘Very kind, Audrey, but I’m not really eating cake at the moment and I don’t want to waste it. I’m on a bone broth reset. I’m auditioning in a fortnight. A new quiz show, actually. They’re making a pilot. Need to get myself right.’

‘No problem. It’s no problem at all. I’m sorry I’ve disturbed you. You might prefer some mandarins from the tree? I’ll see you at the pub on Tuesday and I’ll bring some with me. Or some jam? The jam is great. I make batches of it. Are mandarins and jam allowed on the reset thingy?’

‘No, not really. No sweet stuff. Not even fruit or stuff like fruit. Look, I’ll have to say bye for now, Audrey. I’m in the middle of something.’

Audrey hadn’t taken the cake to Wanda because she didn’t think Wanda knew who she was. She only knew Wanda through the stories the trivia group had shared, recounting the woman’s rants in the park about dogs off leash, uncollected dog shit and the stinking garbage bins being left out on the wrong nights by her neighbours. If the cake is going to be wasted, she thought, I will eat it myself. Clutching the round Tupperware container she had bought for Tom, Audrey walked quickly home and googled bone broth reset and recipes for mandarin jam.

•

As far as Audrey knew, none of the trivia group caught up with each other outside of the pub beyond coincidental meetings in the harbourside parks, at the Saturday growers’ market or at the village shops. They’d all signed up on a sheet of paper, pinned to the pub noticeboard, to a local waifs and strays trivia group, now known as The East-Enders. Most of them strangers until the first night, when they not only met but won. They ordered celebratory sparkling wine and split the prizes, enthusiastically agreeing to do it all again next week. There were high fives. Audrey had studied flags of the world, capital cities, the constellations, and the lineage of Australian prime ministers in between.

Lorraine grandly invited Audrey to a high tea early on, but when Audrey knocked on the door holding a bouquet of peonies and wearing her best dress, Lorraine appeared bedraggled and confused in a stained brunch coat and slippers.

‘When are the others coming?’ Audrey asked, meaning Tom.

‘I don’t know. Who else would come? And why are you here again?’

‘You invited me to high tea.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Lorraine found some stale digestives after fumbling at the back of a sticky food cupboard, while Audrey made cups of tea without milk, found a vase and washed the cascade of dishes in and around the sink.

‘I’m not myself today,’ Lorraine said through spilling tears.

‘That’s okay. I get it.’

None of the group had ever asked exactly where Audrey lived, and she happily left it vague after her dispiriting afternoon at Lorraine’s. She had found Tom’s place by physically stalking him one Tuesday evening after they won. Hiding in the dark against the wall at the bottom of the meandering stairs that led through his yard of weeds and ironic 1950s garden ornaments to the little liver-brick cottage, Audrey had contemplated, for twenty minutes, whether to ascend and knock. She leaned into the cool wall before dawdling home ambivalent.

‘No, I won’t stay for another, but thanks, Sean. It’s been great to see you all. I’ve been out all afternoon at a baby shower, and you can’t begin to imagine how that was! Plus I have a family lunch tomorrow, and who knows how that will go. Such is my social whirl.’

‘Oh god, you’re funny, Aud,’ Lorraine said. Again.

‘That’s what I’m told. Anyway, I’m going to head home. See you all on Tuesday.’ Audrey walked her arse off the high stool as smoothly as she could. She had no purchase on the tread beneath her dangling feet and manoeuvred with one cheek following the other, caterpillar style. A final humiliating little jump to the floor.