CHAPTER 1 #2
‘So he hasn’t made a move, which I totally respect because no one wants to be the creeper at the gym.
But then when we were having the gym drinks tonight, I suggested that rooftop bar because I thought that’s the perfect spot for him to make a proper move.
I basically handed it to the man.’ I briefly wonder what it feels like to be so sure a man wants to have a crack that I could line up the perfect setting for him to do so.
Distantly, I hear the timer go off for the gems. Bee doesn’t require more than understanding nods at this point.
‘And we were dancing, and he was just all over me, Gertrude. So, I decided to be an independent twenty-first century woman, like you always tell me…’ Do I?
‘and went to kiss him. But he pulled back and told me that he couldn’t taste me once and then leave me behind.
’ She sighs wistfully. ‘He said he just wasn’t strong enough. ’
Equal parts impressed and disgusted now. He gets points for the landing, but it isn’t enough to make up for that thing about tasting her.
‘Oh, okay! So it didn’t have anything to do with him pashing that chick in the back of your last story?’
‘What?’
Why, Gertrude, why? You were so close.
Bee frantically searches for her phone among the discarded clothes.
I watch her watch her own stories. See her face crumple when she makes it to the last. The sun is starting to peek through the edges of the curtains on the opposite wall.
The gems are absolutely drying out, well on their way to burnt at this point.
Can the air fryer burn things, or does it just turn them into fossils?
Is it a fire hazard? Bee flings herself back onto the bed, her open-mouthed wails muffled by all the fabric.
Quietly, she says, ‘Gertrude, do you think he’s even going back to Colombia? Or was he just planning to switch gyms?’
Quietly, I’m inclined to think the latter. But if I’m planning on getting any sleep at all, I need to hold that in. I will not self-sabotage twice in one conversation.
‘I’m sure he was just looking to blow off some steam after having to walk away from what could have been with you.’ Bee seems placated by this, but it gives way to another issue.
‘Why is it so hard for me to find a man? I feel like I’m going to be alone forever.
’ There has been, rough guess, an aggregate thirteen weeks in our adult lives in which Bee has not had a partner, boyfriend, friend with benefits, situationship or flirtationship.
But perhaps I have a different definition of hard to find a man.
I stroke her hair. ‘He’s out there for you, Bee. You go shower. I’ll be here with potato gems when you get back.’ I really hope they aren’t burnt, because I can’t stand to see Bee disappointed all over again.
‘Up you get,’ I say. I have permitted overnight drama to morph into early-afternoon wallow.
(Well, not really, I just stayed in bed doomscrolling until way too late.) I don’t realise until about two o’clock that Bee isn’t out paying someone to torture her and call it exercise, but is in her room with the door closed, pity party for one.
We’re not having that. I walk past her and pull the lever to open the window slats. Not as dramatic as a big curtain reveal, but I don’t want to damage the mechanism. ‘Come on, Bee. You’re not a vampire. You’re a…a lizard. You need sun to survive.’
‘A lizard?’ she cries, still muffled by the blankets. I can see a tuft of her hair sticking out over the top. It makes me chuckle.
‘A flower! A flower. A great big sunflower that needs to get the fuck up and let this room air out while we go and have sugary cocktails and overpriced pasta at the new place around the corner.’
I gave us an hour and a half before the reservation, building in extra convincing time, and it takes every second of it to get Bee out the door.
The restaurant is trendy, with olive-green textured wood panelling, small round tables and comically large bowls (the bowl itself isn’t that large, but the rim is taking the piss).
Luckily for us there’s only one other party there, up near the window, and judging by the awkward yet fascinated body language, it’s a first date. A pretty successful one, given that he’s started stroking her leg underneath the tiny table.
We sit in the middle of the restaurant, exposed.
I can hear the chatter from the kitchen over the light music.
There are four waiters standing at the pass, and as we sit, they launch: one deploys the napkins, the other explains the specials and the last offers us still or sparkling and makes a bit of a show of using baby tongs for the lemon wedges.
One is left behind only because we can’t possibly fit anyone else around the table, and he looks dejected as he pretends to wipe down a surface.
I take a sip of the second-cheapest white and look at Bee. There’s a slight frown on her face. ‘Is your wine not good?’ I ask.
‘It’s fine,’ Bee replies, her voice wobbly. Waiter #1 comes back over to take our order, but I ask him to give us five. Come on, he can hear everything we’re saying—he knows we’re not ready. Go bother the lovebirds, mate.
Bee takes a big gulp, says, ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ then walks out. Not towards to the bathroom. Out the front door. Her silhouette crosses the windowfront, peering at its phone.
I look at the army of waiters. They look at me.
No, I don’t know where she went.
No, I don’t know if she’s coming back.
No, I have no idea what went wrong.
‘Can I please get some of the kingfish to start?’
It’s nine minutes that Bee is gone, but it feels like ninety. When she sits back down her eyes are blotchy, and I know she has been crying. She stares at the crudo as it lands on the table.
‘Are you okay?’ I ask.
‘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’s lame here.’ 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 simply had to 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? I told you 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.