‘What did the orthodontist say?’ I asked as we headed for the carpark.
Red indicated the problem, open-mouthed. ‘E ed I eed a ate.’
‘Why do you need a plate?’ Aside from further enriching some overpriced gum-digger, I was already sending Wendy five hundred dollars a month. Not that I begrudged a penny.
‘E ed I ot a oh a ite.’
‘You haven’t got an overbite,’ I said. ‘Your face is the same shape as mine. I look okay, don’t I?’
Red eyed me sceptically. His gaze lingered on my bandaged ear. He didn’t say anything, but I could already sense them gift-wrapping my birthday copy of First Aid for the Home Handyman at the Sydney branch of Mary Martin.
‘You think Tark’s home today?’ This was Red being sensitive, not wanting me to think it wasn’t me he was here to visit. Tarquin Curnow was his best mate in Melbourne, possibly the world, and doubtless the two of them had already been on the phone, cooking up plans for the weekend. Whenever Red came to stay, he headed directly to Tarquin’s place and the two of them hung out like Siamese twins.
I took no offence. Tarquin Curnow had been Red’s friend since kindergarten, and the clincher when I bought my house was that it backed onto the same lane as the Curnows’ big terrace. Tarquin’s parents, Faye and Leo, were old friends and better ones than I deserved, especially Faye who tended to worry about my unattached status. It affronted her sense of the natural order. I was beginning to share her sentiments. The temperature had long hit the forty-degree mark and my shopping was beginning to go whiffy by the time we tracked down the Charade and blew the carpark. We headed straight for Tarquin’s place. Not much point in going home just to put a piece of cheese in the fridge. Faye’s would be just as cold.
The Curnows’ front door was opened by a four-year-old girl in a pair of faded pink cottontails. Ignoring me, she took one look at Red, pirouetted on the hall-runner and bolted into the shadowy interior. ‘He’s here. He’s here. Red’s here.’ This was Faye and Leo’s youngest, Chloe. No wonder Red liked it here. If Chloe had a basket of rose petals, she’d have strewn them in his path.
At its far end, the hallway opened into a haphazardly furnished room, part kitchen, part lounge, scattered with the customary detritus of family life and heavily shuttered with matchstick blinds. The blinds made about three degrees worth of difference, so the room felt like it was in Cairo rather than Khartoum. Torpor blanketed the house. Tarquin unfurled himself like a praying mantis from a beanbag in front of the television and the boys scooted upstairs in conspiratorial glee. Chloe dogged them optimistically.
Leo was upstairs, napping. Faye was standing at the sink in a shortie kimono thrashing a handful of greenery under a running tap. I opened the fridge. ‘I’ll have one, too,’ said Faye.
The fridge was a cornucopia of everything from anchovies to zucchini. I deposited the ham and fetta, ripped the tops off a couple of stubbies of Cooper’s Pale Ale and sank into the nearest beanbag, beginning to unwind at last.
A ferociously modish cook, Faye was a journalist by profession. She wrote for the Business Daily -one of those papers that runs stories with titles like ‘GDP Gets OECD OK’ and ‘Funds Pan Mid-Term Rate Hike’-while Leo did something obscurely administrative at Melbourne University. Neither of them were what you might call high fliers and the contrast between Faye’s billion-dollar subject matter and her modestly anarchic personal circumstances never ceased to amuse me.
‘So.’ She added a baptised lettuce to the profusion in the fridge, dried her hands on her kimono and lowered her big-boobed frame into a cat-scratched armchair. ‘You still got a job, or what?’ The question was both personal and professional. Ever solicitous of my personal welfare, Faye also wanted the good oil on the Cabinet reshuffle.
‘Pending satisfactory performance indicators,’ I told her.
‘Arts Ministry, eh?’ she whistled appreciatively. ‘That explains the ear. Trying to wow the art crowd, eh?’
‘And not succeeding.’ I gave her a quick rundown of the previous evening, all the way to the scene at the National Gallery moat. The business about the dead body interested her only mildly-she wasn’t that kind of journalist-but my unconsummated experience with Salina Fleet elicited a sympathetic cluck. ‘Not having much luck lately, are you, Murray?’
‘How come I never seem to meet anyone sane?’ I asked, relaxed enough now to feel philosophically sorry for myself.
‘What about Eloise? You can’t say she’s not sane.’
Eloise was Faye’s most recent exercise in dinner-party matchmaking. A waif-like book editor, she laughed so nervously at my little jokes that the beetroot and orange soup came out her nose. Then she burst into tears on her doorstep when I tried to do the right thing.
‘She was pleasant enough, I suppose,’ I said, not wanting to sound ungrateful. ‘Just not my type.’
‘And what is your type, Murray?’ Faye was beginning to regard me as major challenge. She was constantly inviting me to meals and seating me beside some loudly ticking biological alarm clock. So far, she’d tried to pair me off with a workaholic paediatrician who left when her beeper went off during the osso buco, a lecturer in linguistics who couldn’t stop talking about Pee Wee Herman, and an up-and-coming corporate lawyer with the inside-running on the bottom-line, real-estate wise. And then there’d been Jocasta, about whom the least said the better. The name, I think, speaks for itself.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Someone I don’t have to impress or compete with. Someone who isn’t assessing my genetic material over the entree. Someone nice. Goes off like a rocket.’
‘Someone you can inflate when required?’ said Faye. ‘You don’t want much, do you?’
The boys erupted down the stairs, towels over their shoulders. ‘Can we go to the pool, huh? Huh, can we, huh, can we?’
‘Even better,’ I said. ‘Let’s go up the bush, find a waterhole.’ Coldstream, I supposed, might technically qualify as the bush. Red looked keen.
‘Do we have to?’ whined Tarquin. He’d be a politician one day, our Tark. As a matter of principle, he never did anything without being pressured into it first.
‘I’d take Chloe, too,’ I said, winking at Tarquin, ‘but the seat belt’s broken.’ That sealed the deal. A boys-only expedition into the wild.
‘You stay and help Mummy,’ Faye told the crestfallen girl. ‘And we’ll all have a picnic dinner tonight in the gardens, okay? You can invite your friend Gracie, okay?’
I went upstairs to the Curnows’ bathroom and removed the bandages from my ear. It was scabbing up very nicely. I’d certainly come out of my ear-sundering experience better than Vinnie Van G. In two or three days, with a bit of fresh air, my lobe would be good as new.
Smeared with sunscreen, the boys and I piled into the car. ‘Stay in the shade, careful of submerged branches, and don’t get lost,’ suggested Faye helpfully. ‘And watch out for snakes.’ I passed her my squishy fruit, terminating her bushcraft advisory service before Tarquin could chicken out.
We tooled out the freeway, singing along with the radio, the windows wound down. Hits and Memories. Ah bin cheated. Bin mistreated. When will ah be loved. ‘Were you a mop?’ Red wanted to know. ‘Or a rotter?’