Chapter 7 #3
‘Anyway, I remembered that your first client meeting should be over by now, so I decided to find out how it went.’
‘It went well. Very well.’ Michelle was flattered.
Ilse had a lot of fingers in a lot of corporate pies and Michelle hadn’t expected her to show any ongoing interest in such a modest, left-field set-up – not after providing her initial contract advice.
‘Katrina’s client made another appointment.
And we have someone else scheduled for this Wednesday night, plus four more inquiries. ’
‘Really? That’s encouraging.’ Ilse was interrupted by a sudden surge of background noise. ‘Hang on a sec! Let me find a quieter spot!’
As Michelle waited, she heard her father yell, ‘Blast!’ in the living room. She tried to ignore him, concentrating instead on the shuffles, scrapes and squeaks emerging from her phone.
At last Ilse spoke again, much more clearly. ‘There. That’s better. Now – it just so happens I’ve found a new client for you.’
‘Really?’
‘I know him from my yoga class on Sunday mornings. Name’s Filippo.
Hotel executive. Absolutely gorgeous and women are always throwing themselves at him, but he can’t keep a relationship going once he moves in with someone.
He was talking to me about that. Said he might go see a therapist. I told him nonsense. ’
Michelle winced. Ilse was nothing if not opinionated, especially when it came to her friends’ personal problems.
‘I told him all he needed was a bit of practice. Goodness, aren’t Japanese toilets clean? So civilised. Anyway, I just spoke to him and he’s about to send you his questionnaire and amended contract.’
‘Wait. You mean he’s on board?’ If Ilse was actively flogging Dreamwives, there was no end to the business she might flush out. She had the kind of connections the Dalai Lama would envy.
‘I told him if he needed house-training, this was the perfect way to do it. And he agreed.’ Raising her voice over a distant, musical chiming, Ilse said, ‘In fact he was super keen, so I said you’d be fine for the day after tomorrow. You’ll need to confirm the appointment, obviously.’
‘But—’
‘Interval’s over. I have to go. I’ve got friends waiting.’ Something about Ilse’s carefree laugh made Michelle wonder if she was slightly drunk. ‘When I get back, I want to know all the details. Ciao, Michelle. I’m so pleased it’s working out.’
The connection was cut just as Rolf lurched into view, waving a small piece of purple plastic. ‘This snapped off the vacuum cleaner. I was trying to put the dust collector back on and it went and broke itself. Appliances are so rubbishy these days.’
‘It’s a Dyson, Dad,’ Michelle said through gritted teeth. The mysterious piece of plastic didn’t look too vital; maybe they could get along without it.
‘Well, Monty wasn’t in there. I checked.’
‘What about inside the bin? Monty might have been scraped off a plate or collected in a sponge.’
Rolf grunted. As he turned to go, Michelle’s computer pinged.
It was another email – from Ilse, this time, with a bunch of attachments.
One of them was a Dreamwives questionnaire from Ilse’s friend, Filippo Balducci, who lived in Millers Point and didn’t require a ‘dinner experience’.
I’ll take care of the food, he’d written.
He hadn’t ticked any décor boxes, instead adding in the comment field: Home style: Italian Revival Transitional.
Whatever that meant. He also hadn’t included family details and didn’t want any particular kind of atmosphere or Dreamwife.
Provide feedback to help me be a better long-term partner in relationships, was his main request. Well, Katrina would be able to do that, clearly and tactfully.
The only other unusual thing about his questionnaire was his clothing preferences: Please, no crop tops, flip-flops, ripped denim, mesh, neon, prominent logos, bike shorts except on a bike . . .
The list went on and on.
Michelle eyed it nervously. This guy sounded a little hung up – though she had to agree with him about the mesh.
And the logos. And probably also the ripped denim, if she had to be honest. Katrina wore none of those things, anyway – wouldn’t be seen dead in them.
He finished with: Comfortable and casual will do.
A distant thud made her jump. ‘Dad?’
‘It’s all right!’
Was it, though? Straining her ears, she heard a rhythmic thumping and relaxed slightly. Her dad was still moving around. She shifted in her chair to get a better view of the hallway.
Filippo Balducci had ticked or signed every field in the Dreamwives contract. He wanted a Wednesday-night appointment. She was about to mark that down when she remembered Katrina already had Arjun Sengupta on Wednesday night.
With a kind of cold shock, as if someone had thrown a bucket of water over her, Michelle realised she would have to attend to Filippo herself.
Until this moment, she hadn’t really imagined doing fieldwork.
For more than a week, she’d been sitting at her computer, fiddling with contract clauses and building a glittery vision in her head of a desk-bound side hustle, evenings and weekends, that she could juggle along with a real job.
Now she was about to hit the Dreamwives coalface, and she didn’t think she could do it.
She’d never been a wife and both of her long-term relationships had been dismal failures, so how could she possibly tell someone else where he was going wrong?
Rolf stumped past her bedroom door, clutching a spanner while he steered his walking frame.
Michelle groaned, took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
There was no getting out of this. Ilse was rooting for her and Katrina had just put herself out there with the sort of courage Michelle could only dream of.
While Nick and his ilk would probably keep booking Katrina over and over, Michelle had a sneaking suspicion that her own clients would be one-offs.
Wait— Spanner?
‘Dad?’ she called, bouncing to her feet. ‘What are you doing?’
No response. When Michelle caught up with Rolf, he was in the kitchen. ‘Dad, what’s the spanner for?’ She tried to keep her voice level.
‘For the dishwasher. I thought I’d check the filter.’
‘You don’t need a spanner for that.’ Michelle took custody of it; she dreaded to think what kind of damage her father might do with a spanner. ‘As you’d know, by the way, if you ever cleaned the filter yourself.’
He mumbled something about Michelle being just like her mum, but let her take charge, hovering in the background as she dismantled the filter – which was full of spinach and oatmeal, but no Monty.
‘What about in there?’ Rolf leaned over her hunched back, pointing into the bowels of the dishwasher. ‘Look – there’s a screw. Where’s the screwdriver set?’
‘Monty can’t have got in there, Dad. The filter would have stopped him. That’s what filters are for.’ Hearing the thump of Rolf’s walking frame, Michelle spun around to yell, ‘Dad, stop! I don’t need a screwdriver!’
If she hadn’t been squatting, her hands full of greasy components, she might not have spotted the bright little object stuck to her father’s pyjamas.
‘Wait, Dad, I’ve found Monty!’
By the time he’d finished painfully executing a 180-degree turn, she was already plucking a tiny figurine from the back of his pants leg. ‘Look. He’s been on you all along.’ She studied the fibres trailing from Monty’s beret. ‘The paint must have been wet.’
Rolf snatched the miniature from her hand, scowling. ‘Damn and blast. I’ll have to redo the whole thing.’
‘Then can you please be more careful with him? My Dyson’s suffered enough already.’
Michelle registered the tone of her own voice: clipped, snarky, long-suffering.
She sounded so mean. Granted, Rolf would try the patience of a saint, but he was just an old guy with health problems. He wasn’t violent or controlling or incontinent – yet.
He was just lazy and self-absorbed and beset by stupid ideas, like so many people.
How was she going to keep her cool as a Dreamwife if her own father made her want to drive to the end of a pier and scream?
Oh, God, she thought, I’m so not ready for this. Office politics were one thing, but even pseudo-personal relationships in a domestic setting were going to be a challenge.
On her way to check the vacuum cleaner, she decided to ask Katrina for help. If anyone could show Michelle the best way of faking a happy home life, it was Katrina. Michelle needed training – training to the level of a TAFE diploma – and Katrina was the perfect instructor.
‘Michelle, Monty just fell under the couch! Can you get him, please? I can’t kneel down!’
‘Hang on!’ Michelle peered at the Dyson. Sure enough, a catch was broken; the dust collector wouldn’t clip on anymore.
First thing, she decided. She would call Katrina for help first thing tomorrow morning.