Heart of Glass (32 page)

“
Fuck me!” Coops muttered,
knocking his glass of wine across the linen tablecloth.

I glared at him, not knowing
if the expletive related to the wine or the Wonder Woman
impersonator who stood opposite us.

“
This is Skye,” Ben said,
as he drew a chair from under the table and offered her a
seat.

Of course, I thought, her
name would be Skye. A thing of such beauty would never have a name
like the rest of the populace.

“
Skye…. Justin, Prue, Bella
and Coops.”

From the other side of the
table, Skye reclined with her long legs crossed and nodded in our
direction, as if we were servants waiting to be dismissed.
“Pleasure. Ben, could you get me some bottled water, please? Evian,
if they have it.”

We looked at each other as
Ben went to the bar and Skye gazed over our heads with no intention
of conversing further. We’d been pigeonholed and packed away as
unsuitable in the first ten seconds. We knew where we stood and it
wasn’t on an equal footing with her.

“
What do you do, Skye?” I
asked. I couldn’t have given a shit less but someone had to show
some manners and the others were still trying to drag their mouths
off the table. How dare Ben flash one of his women in my face. It
was … appalling. Why, only a few weeks before he’d told me bimbo
models weren’t his style. Now he was bringing them on
dates.

“
I’m a swimsuit
model.”

I grinned stupidly. Of
course.

Next to me, Coops spluttered
into his napkin. “Sorry, something in my throat.” Apart from his
dream of watching two girls get it on, being with a swimsuit model
or a Playmate was the next best thing.

“
I don’t s’pose there’s a
lot of call for that in winter.”

“
It’s only a hobby. I work
at the University of Melbourne.”

Shit.

Praying that she was going
to tell me it was as the tea lady or parking attendant I waited for
her to elaborate, until Ben added, “Skye’s a Doctor of Sociology.
She’s doing research into the link between sleep patterns and
violent crime.”

Oh please! I thought,
surmising that if she didn’t remove herself from Ben’s body she may
experience a violent crime first hand.

“
That must be very
interesting work.”

“
Sometimes.”

It was plain to see Skye was
only with us under sufferance.

All through dinner, at which
more earth shattering revelations were brought to the fore,
including the news that Phil’s partner, Lee, was in fact a very
good looking man called Leigh, and not the girl we’d all been
expecting, I studied Ben and Skye across the table with the
precision of a hawk watching a nest of field mice. Skye picked at
her vegetarian entrée size cannelloni, declaring she shouldn’t be
eating carbohydrates after 8pm, it made her bloated, and promptly
went to the ladies room (probably to throw up). Ben on the other
hand, demolished his rump steak with the gusto of a medieval knight
and smirked at me across the table. His use of Skye as a jealousy
tactic was working like a charm; we both knew it, especially with
her hand firmly locked to his as it was. Ben was indifferent. He
spent the entire time making jokes and telling the table about what
we were like when we were teenagers. Everyone laughed and had a fun
time. Skye looked exceedingly beautiful, even when bored and I sat
and seethed.

***

At nine-thirty, prising
herself away, Skye stood and announced to the restaurant that she
would need to go home for an early night, she had a shoot in the
morning and a 5am start. Picking up her massive bag, she brushed
Ben off with a token peck. “You stay with your little friends,
darling. I need the sleep anyway,” she said, and swanned out the
door, a vision in flowing black pants.

As Ben rose to see her out
to the cab she had pre-ordered before the evening had even begun
the rest of the table breathed a collective sigh of relief. She may
have been the most beautiful woman we’d ever seen but she was also
mind-numbingly boring.

“
That was interesting,”
said Prue.

“
Jesus,” Justin
said.

“
Who the hell was she?”
Phil asked.

Coops, of course, was almost
speechless. “Well, fuck me.”

I turned to Justin and
poured the remainder of my wine down my throat. “Did you know about
her?”

“
Of course not. Ben asked
if it was okay for his friend to stay over for a couple of days,
but I’ve never met her. How was I to know she was Lynda Carter in
disguise?”

“
Does he have any other
friends like that?” Coops asked, still overcome by the fact that
Wonder Woman’s breasts hadn’t moved for the entire
evening.

“
I beg your pardon?” I
said.

“
Well you’ve got to admit
she was incredible to look at.”

Prue let out her trademark
snort, “Beauty is only skin deep, Coops, a fact that has been
clearly illustrated for us all tonight. She was, without a doubt,
the most boring person I’ve ever met.”

“
Hear, hear!”

“
Who’s boring?” Ben asked
as he sat down again.

“
Your girlfriend,” I
snapped. “She didn’t want to spend time with the likes of us. Even
polite conversation was too difficult.”

“
She comes across a bit
snooty but it’s only because she spends all day with her head in a
book. She’s not a people person and she’s not my
girlfriend.”

“
Well, that’s a relief,”
Justin said. “Imagine if you married her. We’d have to spend the
rest of our lives looking at her across the dinner
table.”

“
Bloody disaster,” Coops
muttered.

“
Will you two give it a
rest, please? Anyone’d think you’d never seen breasts
before.”

“
Not breasts like that… no
offence girls but they were damn fine.”

As we left the bistro and
went out into the night, on our way to ‘41’ a new club in town, we
settled into cosy conversation. Phil and Leigh led the charge, arm
in arm and looking very much in love while Prue, Justin and Coops
followed along, laughing and discussing the pros and cons of being
strikingly beautiful and yet dead boring. For some reason I
couldn’t fathom, that meant that Ben and I were alone, again, and
taking up the rear. I hadn’t orchestrated the situation and given
the raging jealousy that had resurfaced and was coursing through my
veins, it wasn’t the best place to be. I wanted to smash his head
into the footpath.

Determined not to let Ben
goad me, I linked my arm through his as we walked somewhat
companionably, listening to the laughter and jovial comments ahead
of us.

“
Why’d you invite her?” I
asked. “Were you trying to make me jealous?”

Ben grinned and I could feel
my heart melting, just like it always did when he smiled. “Did it
work? I seem to remember a time when you’d have slapped me for
it.”

“
I’d like to slap you, now.
Spending an evening with that sort of beauty is something that
requires preparation.”

“
You don’t need to feel
inadequate; most of her beauty is surgically enhanced. You’ll
always be the most beautiful girl in the world to me.”

I stopped and looked at him.
Was that an admission? Knowing Ben it was more than likely some
flippant comment designed to excite but nothing more. “Still…you
shouldn’t have brought her. It was a gathering of friends. She
wasn’t friendly at all. She didn’t even talk.”

“
Contrary to what you may
believe, the whole world doesn’t revolve around you. Skye rang on
the spur of the moment because she was coming to do the shoot. It
wasn’t planned.”

“
Hmph.”

He squeezed my arm, “Hey, I
didn’t mean to upset you.”

“
It’s okay, I’m just
paranoid. It’s hard to see someone you were once in love with,
cosying with someone new. It hurts.”

He looked into my eyes. “I
know.”

For a moment, we stood.
Neither of us said a word. We merely stood and the world passed us
by.

Then a voice boomed from the
darkness. “Hey, pretty boy, she givin’ you a hard time?”

I squinted into the middle
of the road, trying to make out where it had come from.

“
Don’t put up with any shit
mate,” a deeper voice yelled. “Just fuckin’ smack her if she’s
pissin’ you off.”

A third voice muttered
something and laughed. I shivered involuntarily. It’s menacing
tones made a serial killer sound like Greg from The Brady Bunch.
Gripping Ben’s hand, I stood on tiptoe. “Let’s get out of here,” I
whispered. “They don’t sound like they want to make polite
conversation.”

Ben looked up and down the
street where we stood, by that time, alone. With our dawdling the
others had disappeared around the corner, into the relative
darkness between the expanse of streetlights. There was no way we
could call for help, and what use would a couple of gay guys and a
tall skinny bloke with no muscles be against the apes that were
blocking our path. And there was no way I was involving Coops in
this. His face was far too precious to me.

The second ape stepped up
onto the curb in front of us, “I said, just smack her if she’s
giving you grief, man.”

I could smell the alcohol
seeping through his pores and see the aggression building in his
eyes.

“
I wasn’t giving him a hard
time and I don’t think our conversation has anything to do with
you,” I said.

“
Shut up,” Ben hissed, his
hand squeezing mine so tight the blood couldn’t circulate. “You
can’t talk us out of this one.”

“
But they’ve got no reason
to pick a fight with us.”

“
Shut…up… Bella,” Ben
repeated.

The second Neanderthal
looked in danger of bursting out of his flannelette shirt at any
moment. His podgy face was a pale shade of beetroot, perhaps from
drinking too much, and his boots looked like rejects from the
costume department of a Neo-Nazi movie. “Yeah, why don’t you just
shut up,” he mocked.

Ben took a step in front of
me, protective. “I don’t think there’s any need to be
rude.”

“
Whatcha gonna do about
it?” Bad Guy One pulled a strange studded thing from God knows
where and slipped it over his knuckles.

Ben’s eyes were on those
knuckles as he pushed me down the street, “Run, Bella, for fuck’s
sake, run….”

Running like there’s no
tomorrow is a difficult task when you’re wearing stilettos, but I
managed to dodge my way past them and to the corner. At the other
end of the block, I could see the light of ‘41’ splashing onto the
footpath and the carpet rope that for some reason had the power to
bar even the most well dressed person from entry. It was only a
couple of hundred metres or so away but it may as well have been
the marathon for at that very moment I heard a loud snap as my
ankle lurched to the side and my heel broke.

Howling with the intense
pain, I reached down to remove my shoes. Footsteps were pounding
down the road behind me, and Ben’s voice was calling to keep on
running as he followed behind, but running for any distance at
speed was never my strong suit and I knew they were going to catch
me. My dieing breath would be taken on a footpath, in a torn skirt
and wrecked shoes. I could see my gravestone flashing before my
eyes: “Bella Stone, who died as she lived, with her big mouth
open.” Picking myself up, I ran towards the queue outside the door.
I didn’t contemplate the pain, I just ran.

Panting and dishevelled, I
pushed through the angry crowd and stood in the doorway on my one
good leg. From behind the smoked glass doors, I could hear the
falsetto tones of the Bee Gees ‘Stayin’ Alive’, still a crowd
pleaser after nearly ten years. How ironic, that I should be
standing on the footpath like a flamingo, trying to do just
that.

“
You OK, miss?” The bouncer
stared down at me from over his sunglasses. “You really should get
in line.”

“
But I can’t walk,” I
whimpered. “Please? I have to wait for my friend. I don’t want to
push in.”

Arms folded in front of the
expanse of black that was his chest; the bouncer peered out from
the portico and along the queue. “I don’t see anyone.”

“
He was right behind
me.”

Right on cue, Ben stepped
into the alcove and hands on hips, he bent over taking deep gulps.
“They’re gone. Guess they didn’t want to beat me up in
public.”

His breathing returned to
normal, he saw me hiding between the bouncers. A smile spread over
his lips, and the twinkle returned to his eye. “Shit, that was
close! Thought I was going to have to fight them all. You really
should learn to shut up, Pussycat.”

Distraught tears filled my
eyes.

“
You alright,
Bel’?”

“
My ankle
hurts.”

We both looked down to the
spot where my bony ankle would have been. In its place was a
swelling reddish-purplish balloon with some stubby toes sprouting
from the end. He squatted to examine it.