2
Three days later, I stood nervously in the immigration queue at Sydney airport. I looked down at my dirty feet, pulling one out of my shoe to reveal a dark Birkenstock tan line and remnants of sand. In front of me was a well-dressed woman, holding a passport in one freshly manicured hand and a phone in the other, with a nondescript wheelie suitcase parked neatly in front of her. The boarding pass poking out of her passport indicated that she’d flown business class. I used to be that woman. Flitting in and out of overseas airports with the ease and familiarity that most people did their weekly grocery shop. There was no way she’d checked in luggage. Check-in luggage was for peasants.
‘Excuse me, are you Alex York?’ a voice sang out behind me. I swivelled around to see two teenage girls, hair braided, no doubt fresh off a flight from Fiji or Hawaii. They both looked at me, wide-eyed and excited.
‘That’s me! Hello!’ I sang back kindly, slipping into my old routine.
One of the girls, a redhead, obviously the more confident of the two, readied her iPhone for a photo as she spoke. ‘We love your radio show! We always listen on the way home from netball and we both follow you on Insta. Is Alex @ Night coming back?’
‘Oh, that’s so sweet of you! Would you like a photo?’ I replied, without answering her question.
The girls arranged themselves on either side of me and I lowered myself down a little into the frame as they snapped away for twenty seconds, faces morphing into a variety of pouts and smiles.
‘Thanks, Alex, we’ll tag you!’ the redhead said, once they were confident that the perfect shot had been procured. I winked and waved as they made their way back to their parents who were giving me apologetic looks from a couple of metres away.
‘She looks different in real life,’ I heard the other one say in the distance.
There were two reasons I felt sick with nerves as I slowly moved further forwards in the queue. The first was the obvious reality of the jobless life waiting for me on the other side of immigration.
The second was Tom.
Tom was more than just my producer, and more than just my friend. For four years he’d sat opposite me in a soundproof studio every night while we broadcast around the country from 7 pm till 10 pm. We existed in our own little world, full of inside jokes and insane memories. Like the time he had Starbucks-induced diarrhoea at Pete Wentz’s house.
Our bandwagons were hitched to each other, and the unavoidable truth of the matter was that when I walked out on my job (and my life), I threw his life into disarray without much thought.
I had meant to apologise to him before I got on the plane to leave for the Philippines, but I didn’t. And then I meant to call him when I arrived on the island, but I didn’t. Next thing, seven weeks had passed and by then it was too late and too awkward and I avoided the situation altogether.
When I finally had the guts to respond to his text and let him know I had booked a flight home, he offered to pick me up from the airport. This response was confusing given he must have been upset with me. It was also confusing because he didn’t own a car. He then sent a photo of himself posing topless in my Mercedes, informing me that he’d been using it since the day I skipped town. Because of course he had.
Once I finally cleared customs and collected my bags, I found myself nervously scanning the crowd of excited families and weary travellers in search of my ride. It didn’t take long to spot him. There he stood, his blond hair perfectly combed into place, with a fresh fade on each side. He was wearing a sand-coloured tracksuit with matching Yeezy sneakers that made him look like he was part of a very fancy cult, with a black bumbag—Prada, I could tell from a mile away—draped diagonally across his front. He was holding something in his left hand that I couldn’t quite make out. As I got closer, I realised it was a sign. A sign that made the knots in my stomach unravel as I laughed.
‘WELCOME BACK DICKHEAD,’ the sign read.
He had even drawn the ‘i’ in the shape of a dick. I picked up my pace and, once in earshot, yelled in his direction, ‘I am a TOTAL dickhead! A selfish, losery dickhead who doesn’t deserve you!’
He glared at me, the sign still prominently displayed in his hands. ‘Go on …’
I was now standing in front of him. ‘I’m an idiot. I shouldn’t have left you high and dry like that. I was just too stuck in my own heartbreak to think about how my decision would affect your life. I was a shit mate. And you’re the best producer and the best friend and just … the best everything. I’m so sorry.’
He looked back at me sternly with pursed lips. ‘Hmm. Well, I got four parking tickets in your car and haven’t paid a single one.’
‘Is that your way of saying you forgive me?’
‘No. It’s just me saying that I got four parking tickets in your car and haven’t paid a single one.’
‘Right. Well. I’ll pay the fines, that’s fair. Thanks for picking me up.’
‘Hmm. The sign idea was really only going to work at the airport, so my offer wasn’t purely altruistic.’
We stood there in silence, me with my arms crossed and Tom still holding the sign. This was as close to ‘serious’ as he got, and underneath the paint and glitter, this was his way of letting me know that what I’d done had really hurt him.
I reached out and touched the sparkly penis on the cardboard. ‘You did a good job on the cock.’
‘Well, you know me, arts and crafts captain in Year 1.’ He sighed. ‘That kind of commitment to artistic expression doesn’t just fade overnight.’
‘No, it doesn’t. I love you.’
He screwed up his face. ‘Gross. Let’s go. I want Maccas chips on the way. Your shout.’
And with that, Tom was off and walking towards the carpark as I scampered behind him, bags in tow, trying to keep up.
‘Wait! You said you’d tell me what this news was when I landed!’ I called after him.
He yelled back over his shoulder without slowing down. ‘I lied. Kinda. Well there’s news but it’s not my news to tell. Expect an email tomorrow.’
Curiosity gnawed at my insides, but I still had grovelling to do and was in no position to make threats or demand answers. I made a face and decided to concentrate for the time being on getting to the car before my arms pulled out of their sockets.
We drove for the next half an hour eating fries and sipping milkshakes, blasting Rihanna while I regaled Tom with stories from my time on the island and promised to take him back one day. The thought of an island romance was almost as enticing as the cheap massages, he told me.
Soon enough, we pulled up in an all too familiar suburban street, and I felt a wave of hesitation as I looked out at the closest thing I currently had to a home. I hopped out and unloaded my bags from the boot.
‘You all good?’ Tom asked through the window, loudly slurping the last of his strawberry thickshake.
‘Yep. Thanks for the ride. Just bring my car back at some point this week. I don’t exactly have much going on, so no huge rush.’ I sighed as I looked towards the house.
‘Well, babe, if you ask me, your first priority needs to be a very long shower and a mani-pedi. You should be lucky I even let you in the car with those feet. Give my love to May! You know I love that bish!’
‘I will. Bye, matey. Sorry again,’ I called back at him as I dragged my luggage across the road.
‘You’ll find a way to make it up to me,’ Tom said with a wink, and then he drove off, leaving me standing in front of the gate, the smell of the rosebush giving me a serious case of deja vu.
It was five months ago that I’d fallen arse-first into this very bush at midnight, tears streaming down my face as I watched my hastily packed suitcase roll down the driveway and narrowly miss flattening the neighbour’s cat. The swearing had alerted May, who had appeared at the front door dressed in a silk kimono and moccasins, her reading glasses still perched on the end of her nose. That woman was always, always reading.
Loading myself into the taxi twenty minutes earlier, I had thought that it was possibly the worst day of my life. But lying stuck in a rosebush, while my seventy-year-old aunty tried to extricate me as delicately as possible, I knew that it most certainly was.
‘Come inside, love,’ she’d whispered once I was free. ‘Nothing a cup of tea and some Savlon won’t fix.’
It had soon become clear that a cup of tea and a bit of Savlon wouldn’t even touch the sides when it came to eternal heartbreak and the crushing reality that the boy I loved had decided he didn’t love me back and possibly never had. Instead, I needed to quit my job (and my life) and run away to a desert island, do yoga every day, drink my bodyweight in rum, and make a pact with the universe at midnight on new year’s eve. And when I listed it all like that, I was pretty bloody proud of the effort I’d made to get my groove back.
And while my groove technically wasn’t all the way back, I certainly felt like it was finally within my reach. This time, I made my way down the path in one piece, plonked my bags down and dug deep into my handbag, searching around for a key as the sensor light came on. I needn’t have bothered as moments later the door opened and the familiar scent of May’s Chanel Number 5 enveloped me.
‘Welcome home, darling girl! Come inside! Billy made chicken soup!’