Good Money Read online

  ‘No, Stella, thank you. Lately, Mabor likes to keep to himself. After school he goes to his room, does his homework. He comes out only to eat. But if you want to come and visit with me, have some coffee, it would be all right. Maybe tomorrow?’

  I swallowed, one more day. ‘Great. Tomorrow then.’

  She hailed a taxi and I watched it meld into the sour Melbourne traffic. Taxis were expensive. If she took one to court and back every day of the trial she’d be broke in a week. I’d offered to arrange a lift for her but she was determined to travel alone by cab. To her, the cost seemed irrelevant, which puzzled me.

  I turned to leave and caught sight of Finchley Price pacing down William Street. He was bleating into a mobile. His arrogant demeanour had been replaced by a hunched, anxious whispering as he made for his chambers. He looked stately though, with the black silk gown billowing behind him. The man rocked a wig and robe, I’d give him that. For my part, I fought the evening commuters for a seat on the next tram heading to West Maribyrnong. I sat down and looked out the window, but all I could see was myself sitting in the dock, humiliated and condemned, while Verity Spinks waved around Exhibit A: a battered exercise book.

  Between the tram stop and my home, I detoured via the local fish and chip shop. While waiting for my order, I let my gaze linger on a wall-mounted television, a fast moving series of images: rain, floods, water washing away once firm ground. Then some perky newsreader came on, skimpy camisole, big hair, and inappropriate smile. News, entertainment — who could tell, these days?

  And in finance news, mining company CC Prospecting has urged the government to maintain foreign ownership rules and disallow the entrance of non-Australian companies in the bidding war for control of the Shine Point refinery. CC Prospecting is in a bidding war with Chinese and other foreign companies for the project.

  I cared not. The rain had eased to a drizzle. Passing headlights shone on the wet Union Road tram tracks. A stocky man stood across the street from my building, apparently waiting for someone. Fool, I thought, wearing shorts and thongs in this weather. He made me cold just looking at him. At least he had had the good sense to pull his hoodie up over his head, against the rain.

  Entering my apartment, I dropped the parcel of minimum chips and grilled flake on the coffee table. I was in my bedroom changing out of my work outfit and into tracksuit pants when I heard the clack of heels on the landing. I opened the door to Tania, hair in an up-do and dressed in skinny jeans.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

  She seemed confused for a moment. ‘Oh. Are you busy?’ She had her handbag over her shoulder and a David Jones shopping bag in her hand. In the other hand, down by her side, I could see a bottle of wine.

  ‘I’m not exactly busy, as such.’ Was it Thursday again already? Yes — a week had passed since I first sighted the book. Dear God, I still didn’t have it.

  ‘I have the shoes.’ She handed me the David Jones bag.

  ‘Wow. Great. I’ll try them on later.’ I went to close the door.

  ‘Wait.’ She fished in her handbag. ‘I got you some DVDs. I know you like movies. I thought you might like to add them to your collection.’

  They were pirated — the kind found in markets all over Asia. I sorted through them: The Breakfast Club, The Blue Lagoon, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

  ‘These aren’t really my thing,’ I said. I’d seen them all except The Blue Lagoon. I had to draw the line somewhere. The others were average, and granted that Ferris Bueller knew how to have a good time, I didn’t want them clogging up my DVD library, sitting next to quality like Alien or A Muppet Christmas Carol.

  ‘Stella, please take them. As a favour to me.’

  ‘What do you mean “a favour”?’

  ‘Could you look after them for me?’

  Look after them? She made it sound like she had just handed me a puppy, or a pot plant. But I was nothing if not a good neighbour. ‘If you like.’

  ‘You never know, you might want to binge on teenage movies.’ She laughed and continued to stand there smiling at me.

  I glanced at the bottle, one of her fancy French labels. ‘Like chips?’

  ‘Love chips.’ She came inside and closed the door. ‘I’ll put these away for you.’ She went to my wall of indifferently assembled Swedish bookcases and found a spot for her DVDs on the top shelf, paying no heed to my filing system. I made a mental note to refile them later. She lingered by the shelves scrutinising the titles.

  I got out some plates and glasses and cut my fish in half. I put a portion on her plate with a handful of chips. There was a bottle of tomato sauce in the back of the fridge. I put everything on a tray and carried it to the coffee table.

  ‘Want to watch one?’ I asked.

  ‘This.’ Tania handed me the Hornblower series. Really, she could not have impressed me more if she’d gone for The Lord of the Rings. Bonus points for The Two Towers. I slotted the disc, and she sat on my sofa and kicked off her shoes.

  ‘Colour’s gone,’ she said.

  It was a relic, my television, and everything on the screen was a shade of purple, but I couldn’t be bothered fixing it. ‘I’m used to it.’

  And so, while we watched Horatio sail his frigate into a nest of Dons, we dined on fillet of shark and salted pommes frites, paired with smooth Bordeaux. For her part, she stuffed the chips in her mouth by the handful like a hungry adolescent boy, while I drank most of the wine. To my relief, she was not one to talk while I was trying to watch TV, but every so often she checked her phone.

  ‘Expecting a call?’

  ‘Not really,’ Tania said. ‘I meant to ask — how did the hearing go?’ She blinked her black lashes at me.

  ‘It’s going to trial,’ I said and skulled my wine. My thoughts lingered on Finchley Price. He was in his element striding around the court but I couldn’t imagine him having the same air of supremacy in, say, the TAB or the greyhound racetrack. ‘Heard of Finchley Price?’ I asked.

  ‘No, what’s that?’

  ‘That,’ I said, ‘is a barrister. Nice looking.’

  ‘Ew! Are you insane? Barristers are ugly. They’re all creepy hunchbacks with pasty faces and feathery hair.’

  ‘Hunchbacks?’

  ‘Totally gross.’

  ‘Calm down, I get it. I didn’t know you were so familiar with the legal fraternity.’

  ‘I used to do the mail for Faurtinaux Bath.’

  I hadn’t figured Tania as the itinerant-worker type, with actual life experience. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Straight after school. Gap year. My friend Jimmy and I got the job together. We called them “Fart and go Barf”.’

  I didn’t know what to say that. I looked at her for a moment, while she stared at the screen. I was onto my fourth glass of red and feeling carefree. ‘Tania, can I ask you something?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Have you ever done anything you were ashamed of?’

  ‘Oh God! All the time! I sent this tweet once. I was drunk and —’

  ‘No, I mean like wrong.’

  ‘You mean like killing a sheep?’

  ‘What? No!’ I clearly couldn’t confide in this ninny.

  She made her hurt face, which I ignored. After a moment she said. ‘How’s your client holding up?’

  ‘The unfathomable Mrs Chol? Who can say?’ I rubbed a chip in tomato sauce. ‘She seems pretty tough.’

  Tania nodded eagerly. ‘She sounds amazing. Raising five kids on her own. Well, four now.’ She cringed. ‘But you know, starting a new life in a foreign country. Incredible.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I shrugged. Whatever. I sipped my wine, wanting Tania to stop yapping so I could concentrate on the fetching lieutenant dangling from a rope over a shark-infested sea. On cue, Tania took her handbag and went to the bathroo
m. I hit pause, and dropped the empty bottle in the recycle bin and dumped the plates in the sink. I tried to push the chip paper into the bin but it was stuffed to capacity. I took off the lid and leant on the rubbish with my knee until it surrendered.

  The difference in years was an issue. I preferred the company of women my own age.

  My former best friend, Phuong, and I had known each other since our university days. Sure, we were temperamentally different. She was reserved and cautious and thought men were an optional extra, and I was brash and loud and needed men — a boyfriend, to be exact — like an addict, like a punter at the track, desperate for a sure thing in the last race to recoup her losses. On the plus side, we shared similar values, a love of horror movies, and had the verbal shorthand of an old married couple. As friends, we had the kind of bond that tolerated normal human misconduct in the other. We validated. We supported. We enabled. It was what we did. That was before Phuong found Buddha and became a sanctimonious bore.

  Tania reappeared with freshly applied makeup and we watched the rest of Hornblower. When it was over, I stood, rather unsteadily, to walk Tania to her door. She unlocked her door and flicked on the light.

  ‘All clear,’ she said, a little bashfully.

  I turned to leave and she grabbed my arm. ‘I’ve just had the most awesome idea.’

  I looked at the indentations her nails were making in my forearm. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘A gold triple! We go to the salon early, before it opens.’

  ‘Gold triple?’

  ‘It’s three kinds of treatment, all of them fantastic for your skin.’

  ‘My skin?’

  ‘Yes, if we go before it opens, I can do it for free.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Be here early, before seven.’

  Seven? ‘Look Tania, I’m not sure —’

  ‘No, you have to! Promise you’ll do it. Promise.’

  ‘Um. I promise.’

  ‘Afterwards we can go shopping for a new outfit, the beginning of the new you.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘See you tomorrow.’ And I got the hell out of there before any other promises were made.

  4

  AT THE prearranged time, way too early for my liking, I crossed the landing to number 12. I’d spent a sleepless night filled with thoughts of the mythical gold triple — and how the scouring of my defective dermis symbolised the emergence of a wonderful new me. Crazy shit like that. I’d kept my end of this mad bargain by setting my alarm an hour earlier than usual and dragging my tired bones out of bed. I found a pair of jeans on the floor, and turned my black jumper right-way out; then I put on my black boots, my coat, and my scarf. I looked a fright but I didn’t care. Today, it was Tania’s job to fix that.

  I beat a musical rat-a-tat on Tania’s doorframe. After a little while, I put my ear to the door. I could hear no morning sounds, no showering, no FM radio. I knocked again, long and hard, on the middle of the door. The rest of the building was getting into gear: doors slamming, shoes clomping in the stairwell. Disgusted, I gave her door one last thump and then rang her mobile. It rang out and went to voicemail. I recorded thus: ‘Tania, I’m outside, open your fucking door.’

  I went downstairs. Her Mini Cooper was in her allocated parking space.

  I walked down to the road and looked in both directions. Roxburgh Street was in full morning-transit mode. Single-occupant cars, chauffeured school kids, mothers in dressing-gowns doing drop-offs: the usual free-for-all of noxious congestion to which we’d all become accustomed. I stood in a stream of pedestrians, young men — facial hair, suits, messenger bags — and young women — skirts, scarves, handbags over forearms — striding to the railway station, and I looked towards Union Road. Had she gone for takeaway coffee at Buffy’s? I checked my phone: 7.15am. She’d told me to be on time, the nerve of her. I cursed her and her whole non-committal generation, a bunch of irresolute shape-shifters.

  I headed to Buffy’s.

  ‘Has my neighbour been in this morning? Pretty blonde girl, mid-twenties.’

  Lucas put my coffee next to my newspaper, on the counter, and accepted my coins. ‘No. But tell her I would like her to.’

  The world outside tried to sweep me up in its pointless activity. But I stood there, newspaper under my arm, a determined lost soul. I thought I was a pretty good judge of character. I could not quite believe I had misread Tania, she was no mystery, with her heart four centimetres beyond her sleeve, her face an open pamphlet, her simple needs, her inability to practise the dark art of … well, any of them. We were a kind of before and after, she and I. Except I was what happens when … Ah bugger it, I thought, might as well just go to work.

  I boarded a tram and glanced at the front page of The Age: CC PROSPECTING FILED ACCOUNTS LATE. The Australian Tax Office intended to bring charges against a Western Australian mining company for a massive unpaid tax bill on the $2 billion profit. The company was contesting, with legal representation by — what do you know — Faurtinaux Bath. Below that, in the bottom corner, an ad for an adult beanbag, only $600 — the definitive omen of civilisation’s collapse; next stop, post-apocalyptic dystopia.

  Tucked away on page four: MY CLIENT IS INNOCENT: PRICE. Nice photo of Finchley. I thought about cutting it out. What was I, twelve? I checked the Melbourne forecast, the Queen’s birthday long weekend was going to be pretty standard: cold, overcast, windy, showers. I held my takeaway cup in my bare hands and sighed.

  In the Flemington shopping precinct, I stepped off the tram and walked along Wellington Street to the WORMS premises. I sat at my desk and stared in the manner of an over-tired infant. I rubbed my eyes and groaned. The long day stretched out before me.

  I switched on my phone and hit redial, Tania’s phone rang out. I declined to leave a message. By now, I was worried. I had dismissed her security concerns as the anxieties of a small-town girl in a big city. But what if she was being pursued by a dangerous ex? It was possible that, while she’d never mentioned a boyfriend to me, one may exist. My office walls were covered in posters decrying violence against women. How had I missed the signs? I needed to check with the people in her life who knew her better than me. Her salon seemed a fairly obvious place to start. I found the number for Superlative Skin Sensations, located at the nearby shopping centre known as Knifepoint by locals, and rang them on the work phone.

  ‘Superlative Skin Sensations, this is Kiara,’ said the girl who answered.

  ‘I had arranged for a treatment this morning and —’

  ‘With who were you booked in with?’

  The Catholic within cried out at so many grammatical errors, but I remained stoically mute. I’d gotten into trouble in the past for correcting people’s grammar. ‘Tania. I’m her neighbour,’ I added. ‘I was booked in for a triple golden.’

  ‘Gold triple,’ the girl said coolly. ‘I can’t see any booking. Are you sure?’

  Now I remembered Tania had said it was off the books. ‘I might have the day wrong. Is she there?’

  ‘She hasn’t come in today. I have to call all her clients.’ The whiff of martyrdom in this remark put my dander up. Higher. I wondered how Tania stood the place.

  ‘Where is Tania?’ I heard a female voice in the background ask.

  ‘It’s not like her to not show up.’ I heard another girl say.

  ‘I’ll try her mobile again,’ said the receptionist, who then hung up on me.

  I sat at my desk staring at the screen. On a whim I looked up on an online trader and ordered the box-set of Breaking Bad. Then I went back to rubbing my eyes and groaning. I was doing this when something soft rested on my shoulder. I looked, but a swollen belly obscured my view.

  ‘You okay?’ It was Shaninder, a colleague with expert knowledge of domestic violence statistics, the locations of all the women’s refuges, and
the best Indian restaurants in the western suburbs.

  ‘Self-harm.’

  ‘I see.’ She laughed. ‘Was it fun?’

  I thought of Tania, her crazy generosity, the lovely French wine, Horatio Hornblower. ‘It was a variety of fun.’

  ‘Good girl,’ she said.

  I nodded to her bump. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘All very good. She gets the hiccups.’

  ‘Really? Didn’t know they did that.’

  She patted her belly and turned to go.

  ‘Hey Shaninder, I have a friend who might be in a DV situation.’

  ‘She still living with him?’

  ‘No, but I’m concerned. She’s not answering her phone.’

  ‘Flat battery?’ She smiled benignly.

  ‘But she’s not at home and not at work. Could you check the refuges?’

  ‘This conversation, we are not having.’ She gave me a look that said I should know better, and left me to go back to rubbing my face.

  The hangover was working its way through my eyeballs. I needed to take something. I walked down to Racecourse Road and into a nearby café. Taking a seat in a booth, I ordered tea. The place had mirrors along both walls and from a certain angle an endless-image thing happened — like a cheap special effect on Dr Who — making it almost impossible to avoid my reflection. The horror I experienced each time I saw myself was worsening incrementally. I rummaged in my bag for a packet of painkillers and swallowed two capsules. The tea, when it arrived, had soap bubbles on the top. I jiggled the teabag, took a cautious sip, and started to relax.

  Why was I anxious for the safety of a woman that, in all honesty, I barely knew? A fear, based on a suspicion, due to a feeling, with no proof — that was what I had. What I needed was advice — low key, discreet counsel on the best course of action. I had contacts. I knew people who helped people. There were the good people of the free legal services. I also knew lots of union people, advocates and advisers and mediators and counsellors. There was my mother. Scratch that. There were priests and nuns and bishops. Rabbis and imams. There was my local member of parliament. There was Phuong.