“Don’t suppose you know what sort of makeup Em wears,” I ask her as they walk me to my car. We take a detour and I collect the broken remnants of Em’s phone from the carpark. I’ll buy her a replacement, but I also need to get something she wants in case her next phone ends up the same way. “I think I owe her an apology and I’ve heard it’s better to come bearing gifts.”
“I think you owe her about a decade worth of therapy,” she retorts, then shakes her head. “Wouldn’t have a clue.”
But Zach’s full of surprises. He tosses me his phone with an email order summary on the screen. “That’s what she bought when she had free usage of my credit card.”
I forward it to my phone and hand his back.
“You’re okay to drive?” he asks, frowning. “I can give you a lift.”
A nice offer maybe but the last thing I want right now is company. Except for that of a particular girl. Possibly the last one in the world who wants to see me right now. “I’m good, thanks. See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
I make it to the store on Zach’s receipt ten minutes before closing. A disgruntled employee’s face turns delighted when she scopes out the potential commission on the long list, quickly pulling together the items while I grab a replacement for the phone Em destroyed, so it’s only fifteen minutes before I’m out the door.
The good thing about the receipt is that it also has Em’s delivery address on it. The suburb is terrible but judging from the posts I regularly see on her account, her house is nice. When I pull up at the right number, my assessment undergoes a drastic rethink.
Although the property is enormous, one of those old-style wooden villas with about twenty rooms more than any decent household needs, the key word there is old. In the past century, it’s undergone a drastic reapportionment of living areas, being subdivided into at least a dozen flats.
The jumble of letterboxes and door numbers leaves me reeling. There’s nothing on the order form to show which one is correct.
I knock on the nearest door. While waiting for the occupant to answer, I scan the front lawns, my mouth twisting as I see broken syringes and used condoms nestled among the tangled grass. A rusting car is on blocks at the opposite end of the house, while one of the middle flats has an overturned shopping trolley as a decorative ornament.
“Yeah?” A woman in her sixties answers the door, squinting at the light even though this late in the afternoon, it’s far from its brightest.
“I’m looking for Em Corrigan. Is this her flat?”
“Round the back.”
The woman slams the door shut without providing any further information and I tread warily along the gravel and hard-packed clay that is the overcrowded houses version of a driveway.
There’s a garage on one side, the back of the house on the other. There’s only one door leading out of the house, and I stand with my hands on my hips, staring at it. The internal layout of the house might be crazy but there’s no way the back door doesn’t tie to the flat I just tried.
I turn in a semi-circle, unsure where else to go. In the growing dusk, my impetuous decision seems more like a mistake.
“What d’you want?” calls out a man whose two front teeth are the only survivors of a dental apocalypse.
I repeat my query and his eyes narrow. He slowly covers every inch of my body with their unwelcoming stare, belatedly arriving back at my face. “How d’you know her?”
“We’ve got classes together.”
He snorts, a thin string of snot flying out and adhering on the edge of his stubbled cheek. He continues to smoke the rollie down to the filter before he wipes it away.
“She’s not here.”
I’m holding the makeup in my hand and his gaze greedily fixes on the carrier bag. “Is that a present for her?”
“Yeah. She had a bit of trouble with her locker. This is to replace some stuff she lost.”
The man pushes away from the breezeblock wall of the garage to walk closer. He cranes his neck out, reading or pretending to read the side of the bag. “You can leave that with me. I’ll make sure she gets it.”
“That’s not happening.” I turn and sweep my arm towards the house. “Which one of these flats is she from?”
“You don’t trust me enough to leave her present with me, but you think I’ll give you a straight answer to where she lives?” He laughs, a slow rumbling that gains momentum the longer he makes it. “You think we’d rob our own girl?” He raises his voice to a piercing level. “Cheryl?”
A door in the garage opens a sliver, and a woman stares through the crack with obvious annoyance. “Don’t yell for me. I’m not your damn maid.”
“Boy here’s looking for Em.”
