I t was close to midnight on a sultry, late summer night in Sydney. Nicola stared out over the city, her eyes wide with terror and incomprehension.
On Bent Street, twenty-six storeys below, a lone man strode by, leaning into his mobile. His suit jacket was slung over his arm. A homeless woman rifled through a bin, observed by the bored doorman of a fashionable hotel. One taxi, and then another, sped off empty in the direction of Chinatown. At the tip of Bennelong Point, just beyond the Circular Quay East complex knownas the Toaster, the shells of the Opera House glowed. A train rattled across the Harbour Bridge. The harbour was as deep, dark and silent as a secret.
Nicola knew that the jazz clubs and Irish pubs nestled at the foot of the bridge would be pulsing with music and life. Not far in the other direction Oxford Street would be swarming with clubbers. The venues of Enmore and Newtown would be rocking, and the Cross would be pumping with its own peculiar, deviant energy. But the CBD—the CBD was dead.
And so was Johnny.
Turning from the Bent Towers windows with their expensive views, Nicola shivered. She regarded her lover’s naked body, lying on its side on carpet the colour of ash, illuminated by the flickering light of half a dozen candles. His body was lean and muscular, with a chest just hairy enough to be sexy, but not so hirsute you would need a whipper-snipper to find his nipples. All in all, it wasn’t a bad body, she thought, for a man of forty-two.
Nicola was not aware of shedding tears. Buther glasses had fogged up and when she took them off she noticed they were speckled with salt. She rubbed them clean on the sleeve of her silk blouse.
Her lover was the sort of man Nicola warned other women to stay away from, the type that, as she phrased it, ‘put up a good front but hid their “buts” from view’. As in: ‘So attractive—but doesn’t he know it!’ Nicola wrote a column for
Lip,
a women’s magazine, dispensing advice on sex and relationships. Under the header ‘Anabelle Says’ ran the credo ‘Be Sexy! But Be Sensible!’ What advice, Nicola wondered, would she give herself now? ‘Dump him!’?
It was a bit late for that.
A wave of nausea swept through her and she clamped a hand over her mouth until her stomach settled. Squinting up at the ceiling, trying to slow her breathing, she compulsively patted down imaginary wrinkles in her blouse and tight-fitting skirt, like Lady Macbeth with an ironing complex. None of this would have happened, she thought ruefully, if she’d remained an accountant.
Nicola had landed her job quite by accident and with no qualifications to speak of. It had happened about a year and a half earlier. She was working in the accounts department of
Lip
(‘Looks! Individuality! Panache’) when the previous author of ‘Anabelle Says’ ran off to South America with a gay Brazilian she’d met a week earlier and hoped to convert to heterosexuality.
That afternoon, Nicola popped into the editorial department to drop off some financial reports. The editor, Liz Noble, who’d pulled three all-nighters in a row to put together a special issue titled ‘I’m Going to Sweep That
Stress
Right out of My Life!’, barrelled out of her office and bailed her up.
‘What’s your name again?’ Liz panted, chopping at the air by her ears with her hands. Liz had large green eyes, a surgically perfected nose and a generous mouth into which she was forever feeding cigarettes, chocolates, coffee and anti-oxidant vitamins, sometimes at the same time. She was as naturally scrawny and pale as Nicola was voluptuous and dark. Herwild, bleach-damaged hair looked animated by the same out-of-control energy that inspired her secret staff nickname of ‘Chernobyl’.
‘Nicola. Nicola Biondi.’
‘Bee-what?’
‘Biondi. Like Bondi but with an extra “i”.’
‘Whatever.’ Liz clawed at the lower lids of her bloodshot eyes with her chewed nails. ‘Nicola,’ she said in a
Danielle Steel
Linda Greenlaw
Ember Casey
Katharine Sadler
Melissa Silvey
Jeremy Robinson
JM Harvey
Heather Boyd
Tina Johansen
K Martin Gardner