‘I’m fine,’ she says. There’s that word again. The one nobody ever means.
‘Are you sure?’ I press. I shouldn’t press, and I know I shouldn’t press, because there’s nothing more annoying than when you’re not fine and someone asks you if you’re fine, but I can’t stop myself. I need her to be fine. I’m becoming increasingly less fine every minute she’s not. My heart is thumping,I might knock over the table with my jiggling knee, I’m not quite sure where to look.
Bee’s eyes fill with tears again. When she talks, it’s a whisper, and I swear I see one of the waiters lean in to catch it. ‘I just wish we were somewhere with a bit more of a vibe.’
I look around, and I get it. But…‘It is a Sunday night, though.’
‘I know,’ she says. Then silence. Her wine is finished now. The crudo is untouched.
‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ I ask.
‘No,’ she says.
‘Come on. I want you to be happy. The whole point of this meal is to cheer you up. There’s no point being here if it’s not doing that.’
She looks up, brighter. ‘Can we go to the Japanese place?’
Not the Japanese place. Anything but the Japanese place. ‘It’ll be a two-hour wait.’ Even on a Sunday night. For weird fusion sushi kebabs that feel like they should be illegal. I mean, I want Bee to be happy, but I also want to eat before nine.
‘But it’slamehere.’ I mouth an apology to the staff. They’re not even pretending not to listen anymore.
‘Do you want to go home then?’
‘No,’ she sighs, long-suffering. ‘It’s fine. I’ll just get the gnocchi and then we can go. I wish you’d gotten the burrata to start, though.’ Me too, Bee. Me too. Because dinner comes out within ten minutes, we’ve eaten within another fifteen and we’re home less than an hour after we left. And I think the number of minutes exceeds the number of words exchanged in that time.
I rise with the sun the next day. Not by choice, really, but my bedroom (which I suspect is actually a home office with a good marketing team) has an uncovered skylight so the sun tells me when it is time to get up.
I can’t really complain though. I can barely afford to live in the apartment as it is, so it makes sense for me to take the slightly dodgier room and pay a bit less rent. I used to share a granny flat out the back of an old Greek couple’s house in Carlton with two other girls until Bee started insisting that it was time for somewhere ‘grown up’. And I’m just not hip enough to live northside anyway, right? She told me how much fun it would be to live together, and how much money we’d save because we did everything together anyway and now we could just do it at home, and how she simplyhadto live by the beach for her mental health, and how we could just pay a bit more to get the one with the kitchen island (‘It’s only fifty dollars a week more than that other one!’Each, but sure), and how it was a little bit further from a train or tram stop but that was what Ubers were for, not that we’d need Ubers because we’d be spending all our time together in our fabulous new home, and how there were so many cute bars and restaurants nearby, and how oooh look at this boutique gym!
After a while I kind of blacked out and when I came to, I was filling out forms alongside men in pressed chinos and women in perfectly puffed puffer jackets with no feathers sticking out of the seams.
She was right in the end, of course.See, Gertrude? Itoldyou we couldn’t live without the island! Can you imagine?!
Work isn’t for another five or so hours, so I will naturally fuck around for at least three of those, feel guilty and spend one of the hours being hyper-productive and then rush to get to work on time. By the time I’m pulling my hair into a neat ponytail and swiping a nearly empty tube of lip balm across my mouth I have done a load of washing, folded up the clean washing in the dryer from three days ago, cleaned down the kitchen and given the toilet a once-over. That will get us through until the cleaner comes on Wednesday (‘We’re south of the river now; everyone has a cleaner’) and I don’t want Sue to think we’re slobs.
I grab my bag, slip on the sturdy shoes that really should be more comfortable given their ugliness and follow the sound of classic pop beats to Bee’s door. She is cross-legged on the floor looking into the frontlit mirror she bought from an Instagram ad, rubbing her face with those glass orbs she keeps in the freezer—the perfect cure for a face puffed by an evening of tears. Her expression is serene. For Bee, self-care is next to godliness. It is Serious Business. And look, I might laugh at her lectures on the advantages of preventative Botox, but I can admit it takes impressive strength to get up, de-puff your face and go back out into the world.
I watch Bee get up, bopping absent-mindedly to the music, singing along softly that she is a supergirl here to save the world. She starts pulling options out of the wardrobe and holding them up against herself, tossing away the rejects before settling on something she likes, and I smile and leave silently.
Today is a new day.
IT IS GOINGto be a long fucking new day. I’m in an old hall in inner Melbourne that’s been restored to its nineteenth-century glory. That means it is insanely beautiful—intricate plasterwork in pastel pinks, greens and creams cover the walls and ceilings, there’s gold-leaf trim everywhere, and the floors are actual hardwood, not that fake laminate stuff they put in new houses. Even the bathrooms look like something out of a museum. It also means that it is somehow even colder in here than it is outside and nearly impossible to heat (stupid high ceilings), which is a twofold problem. I will spend the next several hours freezing my ass off, and a significant portion of that time will be wasted listening to people decked out in their flimsiest finery complaining about it too. And of course it will be my fault.
Reg, bless him, had the forethought to bring me a coffee to start our shift, the first of many stimulants that willsponsor today’s episode of ‘Shit I do for rent money’. One of the suppliers has brought the tables and chairs to the wrong entrance and just dumped them there, so Reg and I have to wheel them all around in that misty Melbourne thing that isn’t quite drizzle and isn’t quite fog but still definitely fucks up my hair. And then we just kind of have to sit around for ages because a bunch of big guys in high-vis have tobuild,and no one has really thought about what we would do while that happens.
In the middle of this actually historic setting, they are in the process of building their own fake historic setting. Temporary walls with LED sconces spray-painted a patchy bronze attached, freshly rolled-out carpet, new furniture distressed to look antique, cutlery and crockery in colours that match the ceiling, the only part of the actual building guests will get to see. I have to wear those hospital booties over my shoes to avoid damaging the cream carpet as I set up tables and chairs, but I’ve been doing this long enough to be just waiting for the other shoe to drop—that shoe being some contractor’s muddy boot that will ruin the carpet and make me lose what is left of my mind. The funny part—to me anyway—is that the event in question is some big football thing. Because nothing says men’s professional sport like beetroot carpaccio served on pink floral-printed china.
Several hours, hundreds of plates, thousands of glasses and an unknowable number of flowers later, I wander outside to sit down. It is already dusk, and the frigid air stabs through my wannabe-North Face jacket from Kmart. Reg offers me a cigarette, which I decline, but I perch next to him on anoverturned milk crate and he lights up.
‘Do you ever wonder,’ he says as he draws back, ‘about what happens to all this stuff once they’ve commissioned it for an event like this?’ I open my eyes and look at Reg and his crinkled brow. ‘Like, do they reuse these stupid custom walls for something else, or does it just go into storage or hard rubbish? Just feels wasteful as fuck.’ He is right; it does. But I hadn’t picked Reg for a secret sustainability king. Maybe it’s the smokes that threw me off.
‘I really hope they reuse them. But it’s hard to believe that there’s huge demand for tacky fake nineteenth-century dioramas.’ We look at each other for a moment and then start laughing. I am too busy snorting to notice Bee poke her head out the door.
‘Gertrude! It’s time to get into hair and makeup and uniforms, which, no offence, you need because you both look like shit.’ She looks expectantly at the two of us. Reg stubs out his cigarette and stands, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. ‘Come on, Gertie, time to frock up!’ He takes off back into the hall with a saccharine smile for Bee.
‘You know, Gertrude, you really have to tell them to stop calling you Gertie,’ she says.
‘Why?’ I quite like it.
