CHAPTER 2
The next day, Jeremy still found himself obsessing over the reunion invite, with no decision in sight.
The hours dragged, the event floating over it all like a dull rainstorm.
The stories of the day (a particularly meme-able pig who looked like a wizard, and the untimely death of one of the two men from Two and a Half Men ) were unable to provide much in the way of distraction.
Not even Vanessa turning up with a full camera crew from a fashion magazine was enough to garner more than a moment of incandescent rage.
‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ she gushed, admittedly looking very beautiful and professional.
‘I’m going to be the front cover for a feature on women in business.
Could you sit there and sort of look up at me adoringly, like I’m mentoring you or something?
Don’t worry, your face won’t be in the actual picture. ’
Bathe me in wine , Jeremy messaged his friends’ group chat, which today was named BFG: The Big Fuckable Giant , a joke made so long ago nobody could remember if it was a specific reference to something, or if they had just been drunk and thought it was funny.
Anna: ok pub
Liz: it is a tuesday what else would we be doing
Anna: bettering ourselves and giving back to society?
Liz: i do that on wednesday
Anna: that’s the day I make fun of orphans actually
Liz: seems unnecessary
Anna: no its the perfect crime because they have no parents to tell
Jeremy: you’re both awful but I have a crisis so please come with your best problem-solving brains on
Anna: you’re acting like we need an excuse to drink on a tuesday
Liz: omg you’re being so insensitive, Jeremy is having a crisis. Maybe he’s finally admitting that he’s straight
Anna: sorry jeremy, you know that I can’t support that kind of lifestyle
He managed to leave work relatively on time, mostly due to the chaos of Vanessa’s photoshoot interrupting everyone’s schedules.
When they’d all shuffled in for a dreaded four thirty meeting, in this case about Instagram’s unholy power over the media, Vanessa was laid out across the boardroom table, cameras clicking at her from all directions.
‘Okay, let’s raincheck,’ said Gina, somehow still impassive, not even a vein flickering in her forehead.
While Jeremy stumbled towards the pub like a man dying of thirst in the desert, his mum called.
‘Darling,’ she hollered, ‘I’ve been terribly remiss.’
Jeremy’s mum always sounded like she was bellowing into one of those old-timey phones that looked like a tulip while flinging around a loop of pearls.
‘Oh no,’ he said.
‘I’ve had it sitting on the counter for months, waiting to give it to you next time you popped in … but, well, time passed … and no sign of my only son …’
Having managed to fleece at least two wealthy men out of considerable divorce settlements, Maria was not averse to some light emotional manipulation.
‘Yeah, sorry I haven’t been around lately, it’s just that work’s been busy and, you know … The Shire is a horrifying pit of homophobes who make me uncomfortable.’
‘Nonsense! We have some lesbians up near the community gallery. Or at least we think they’re lesbians; they could be two very differently-sized sisters.’
‘Well, we’ll have to have them around for dinner, I probably know them.’
‘Don’t be sarcastic, dear, it’s unbecoming. Anyway, perhaps I can start looking forward to seeing you next Christmas … if I’m still around then.’
‘You said you’d forgotten something?’ Jeremy reminded her loudly.
‘Yes, because you haven’t come down to visit me. It’s an invitation to your cousin Garth’s wedding, and it just slipped my mind.’
‘I have a cousin? Named Garth?’
‘Yes! You met him once in Western Australia. There’s that cute photo of the two of you stuck in the McDonald’s slide.’
‘I was three years old … I assumed he was a stranger’s kid.’
‘No, that was Garth.’
‘So why am I invited to the wedding of a cousin I didn’t know I had until now? I can’t believe I’m someone with cousins – that changes my whole vibe.’
‘Well, it’s a very big wedding, and his wife is from Sydney, but most of his family are in WA, so I think they’re trying to even things out.’
‘Ah, in case we play tug of war. Okay … when is it?’
‘April twenty-fifth. Two months’ time. Plenty of time to talk to your boyfriend.’
‘The boyfriend I do not have, Mother. Good fishing though!’
‘Plenty of time to meet somebody.’
By this point, Jeremy was out the front of the Builder’s Legs, the craphole pub his closest friends had inexplicably fallen in love with. He could see them sitting in the beer garden, Anna waving her arms in the middle of a monologue, Liz little more than hair and cigarette smoke.
‘Uh, look, we both know that’s not going to happen,’ Jeremy said, and made the mistake of dropping the usual bantering tone he used on the phone with his mother.
‘Oh, darling, of course —’
‘Sorry, I have to go, I’m about to go through a tunnel,’ he said. ‘Bye, love you.’
Jeremy hung up abruptly. There was something about the wedding and the reunion that connected in his mind.
An obvious reason hung just out of reach, but he shook it off and walked into the pub, breathing in the heady scent of warm food, spilled beer and the slightest tang of toilet-cleaning chemicals.
‘I like a pub where you can smell the Toilet Duck,’ Anna had said to him once, ‘because it means it’s the kind of place where they clean the toilets.’
It was logic he could not argue with.
Anna and Liz were sitting at their collective favourite table – private, not close to any doors, and nowhere near where the garden rats were known to frequent. It was a warm night, and Jeremy sank into the free chair with a sigh of relief like someone getting into a bath in winter.
Anna – bespectacled, tattooed, huge septum piercing, short hair speckled with grey, light cardigan despite the heat – grabbed Jeremy’s head and mussed his hair fondly, while Liz – red lipstick, string of fake pearls across a designer shirt, op-shop high femme – merely blew out a cloud of smoke and raised an eyebrow in what could perhaps have been construed as a welcome.
‘Right, I need drinks and then we need to discuss my crisis,’ Jeremy said.
‘Oh goody, a crisis,’ said Anna. ‘I love other people’s problems.’
‘You should just quit,’ muttered Liz.
‘Actually, for once this isn’t a career issue,’ Jeremy said.
‘Hmm, considering you never date, we’re your only friends, and you have no hobbies or even life outside work … I would say that means you accidentally ran someone over and need our help getting rid of the body,’ Liz said.
‘Hmm, no: Jeremy doesn’t drive though,’ pointed out Anna. ‘But I will say, I listen to a lot of murder podcasts and I think I would be very good at hiding a body.’
‘I CAN drive, I just suck at it. Okay, all will be revealed – who needs drinks?’ Jeremy said, standing up again and slamming his hands dramatically on the table.
Liz and Anna already had two drinks each, a wine and a beer so they didn’t have to choose between the two.
It was one of the things he admired about his friends – their commitment to small luxuries, to abundance.
Although when they each put up a hand for another drink, he wondered half seriously if he needed less alcoholic friends to provide a better example for himself. Maybe he ran with a bad crowd?
As he waited at the bar, Jeremy looked around with a mounting feeling of dissatisfaction at the Builder’s Legs.
For the last couple of years – actually, over five years now – he had taken a kind of stubborn pride in the crapulent comfort of the pub.
It was rare to find an old-fashioned place like this in Sydney anymore.
The binary tended to swing between the truly rathole – open until four am, full of knives and drunk uni students, and both unpleasant and unsafe to sit at – or bougie renovated gastropubs with thirty-dollar schnitzels and a haunting amount of goat’s cheese.
Jeremy had enjoyed the comfort of this place, like a pair of old boots or a warm jumper full of holes and dotted with pumpkin soup stains.
He’d boasted about drinking with the regulars, like the crotchety old men at the bar who were still bitching about the Dismissal.
Or their favourite, an old woman named Hilda who crocheted and drank enough glasses of straight gin to pickle someone, and who spent her time chatting to anyone who came near, often invoking alien abductions and some alarming rhetoric about Chinese immigration.
Hilda, who they referred to as a living legend, as the world’s first girlboss, was currently sitting at a booth cutting out faces from old Women’s Weekly magazines.
Usually that would have thrilled Jeremy, but now he was finding it all a bit depressing.
Him and his friends spending every Tuesday night here suddenly seemed like a big waste of time rather than a quaint tradition. Jeremy looked at Hilda and saw his own future written in the gnarled tree-root contours of her face. He shuddered as she took another sip of room-temperature gin.
By the time Jeremy delivered the drinks back outside, Liz and Anna were engaged in a game they’d invented and called ‘Gentle Questions’.
‘What’s the most useful cheese?’ asked Liz, steepling her fingers.
‘Oh, that’s a good one,’ Anna said, leaning back in her chair.