The Fix (25 page)

I moved over to the railing and leaned against it with my elbows hooked over it, facing her. My foot was next to the leg of her chair, my leg next to her leg.

‘I went out with a guy once . . .' She made it sound as if it was a passing thought and perhaps not directed at me. ‘This isn't so long ago. I think he didn't cope with my job and all of a sudden he stopped calling. That's a guy thing – and it's not a good one – to just stop calling. Weeks later I got an email – a group email to about fifty people – that said something like “Tomorrow I am starting the building of some retaining walls and need to borrow a couple of sawhorses. Anyone have them available for a loaner?”'

‘That's intimate,' I said. I called too often and for too long. That had been my problem. With the exception
of Eloise, I called until all hope had been wrung out of relationships and I was told not to call. I wanted to tell Hayley I didn't think I would ever ask people for sawhorses in my life.

‘It's clear enough. A few weeks later I got one from him – another group email, and the last one I got – about sitting and lifting your right foot and moving it in clockwise circles, then drawing the number six in the air with your right hand. It makes your foot change direction and there's nothing you can do about it.' She laughed. ‘Maybe if I'd had sawhorses, it would all have been different.'

I picked up another chair, and set it down beside her.

‘Don't they have one for two people?' she said. ‘What's that about?' She pulled the chair closer, so that its arm was lined up right next to hers.

‘Well, who knows what might go on?'

‘Exactly.'

I sat down. Her hand was still on the arm of my chair. Again, I was about to make the move. The signals were there, surely.

‘I had a guy once at the club,' she said, lifting her hand and then wondering where to put it. ‘I have no idea why I need to tell you this, but I had a guy once who gave me a thousand dollars to, well, kind of, fuck my feet.'

I couldn't be certain what was showing on my face. My head was nodding. ‘Both feet or . . . or just the one?'

A man had fucked her feet. I didn't live in that world. I didn't even know what it meant.

‘First he gave me fifty bucks to take off my shoes,'
she said. She sounded uneasy about going into the details. ‘Which was no big deal. Then he wanted to massage my feet, and I'm not really into that, being paid for that, any touching, so we had to have a talk. Which was when he made the big offer. It was the start of the year. I had a lot of textbooks to buy. And I have to pay my own way through uni. I'm not some trustafarian with a river of family money coming in. That won't surprise you after what I've said about my parents. And it didn't even seem sexual, the foot thing. It was actually kind of . . . abstract. It was both feet. Between both feet.'

‘So, it was your arches then.'

I had no idea why I was clarifying a point about the technicalities. I was trying to sound as if everything was normal. I was focusing on the sound of normal. Nothing was normal. A fetishist had fucked her feet. But I didn't think it mattered, not really. I had a smallish unremarkable life to compare it with and, it turned out, an abnormal relationship with fortune cookies. Other people's horizons were wider than mine. Some made money from their feet.

‘Yeah, I think it was,' she said. She had great arches. She had one foot up on the lower railing and her legs were crossed at the ankles. I had flat feet. I had always been impressed by arches. And yet had never thought to have sex with them. ‘It was. Fifty bucks for a look, a thousand for . . . more. I made him wear a condom and told him he'd pay double if I got any stuff on me. Legislatively I'm not sure where it stands. There's a real risk it's prostitution. It's not dancing, obviously.'

A gust of wind blew by, pulling the lounge-room curtains out through the open sliding door and onto the balcony, then dropping them again. We both turned and looked inside, but there was no other sign of movement.

‘Tell me if that's too appalling,' she said.

‘It's . . . very abstract.'

She waited for more. I had a crowd of things to say in my head, and they were blocking the exits.

‘Here's where I stand,' she said when she had waited long enough. ‘I don't have sex with people for money. I don't have any great moral objection to it, but it's about keeping some things so that they can happen when I actually want them to. I'll never want anyone to fuck my feet, so that seemed okay. At the time.' Her hand was on my arm. She didn't even seem to know. ‘You're appalled, aren't you?'

‘No. I . . .'

‘There's worse than that out there.'

I was back with the kids who thought babies appeared under cabbages. There was a whole world of sexual practice in which feet were only the entrée and my education cut out early.

‘I'm not even beginning to be appalled,' I told her. ‘I can't match the foot story, but I want you so badly I am trying not to tell you in case you run away. That's all that's in my head.' It was a shock to hear it myself, a shock for it to be out, a dive from the ten-metre tower to blue water, hard as glass. I had met her in the doldrums, in a compromised life made up of bills and facile blogs and ambitions I had yet to come close to realising. ‘You had me at “Mark Felt”.'

She took a breath in. She took my face in her hands. She moved so that her face was inches in front of mine and she dropped her voice to a whisper and said, ‘Okay, kiss me. Kiss me the way people kiss in a world where no money changes hands and they just have to do it.'

* * *

IT WAS LIKE CASABLANCA,
that line. Like a line right out of a classic movie from the forties. But no one had to get on a plane and leave forever as the world fell into a long and terrible war. I kissed her, she kissed me, Ben kept his door closed.

‘Let's go to your room,' she said after a while.

We ended up in hers, since I had to confess I'd taken the kids' room and had two single beds. We shut the sliding balcony door as quietly as possible and moved to her room like cat burglers. Moonlight came in through the glass doors on the far side and fell across the bed.

‘I've got to tell you, I didn't bring anything for this.' My hands were on the warm skin of her back. She was pulling my shirt off and we were crab-walking towards the bed. Every spare second for six days had been spent dreaming up this moment, then telling myself it would never happen. ‘I didn't want to make assumptions. Or look like I'd made assumptions.'

‘So analytical,' she said. ‘So excessively analytical.' She bent down, reached into her bag and rummaged around in the dark. She stood up with a strip of about ten condoms in her hand. ‘So, now I look like I've made assumptions?'

‘If the assumption is that we'll get through all those, well, I think I'm in love with your assumption. Or at least very serious like. And I'll definitely give it my best shot.'

She pushed me onto the bed and climbed on top of me. She whipped my chest with her string of condom packets, and laughed.

Then she said, ‘Hang on a second.' She turned them over and looked at them closely in the moonlight. ‘Just checking the expiry date. It's been a while.' She nodded and tore one from the end of the strip. ‘I think we're good to go.'

* * *

THE LIGHT WOKE ME.
Dawn was making its way into the sky ahead of the sun. Hayley was stretched out under the white sheet, her hair a mess on the pillow. Her shoulders were bare and one leg had kicked beyond the sheet. She had fine arches.

I willed her to wake. She didn't.

Around two hours later I was in a dream that started to smell like toast and sound like a kitchen. Ben was making breakfast. I listened to him, to how quiet he was trying to be.

Hayley had one eye open when I turned her way. She reached out and put her hand on my cheek.

‘What kind of effort was that?' she said, her voice still full of sleep. ‘I think I've still got at least seven of them left.'

‘I made another assumption,' I told her. ‘I assumed I didn't just have last night.'

‘All right,' she said. Her eye sagged closed again. ‘That works.' She rolled onto her back. ‘Hungry now . . .'

I leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. Ben was stirring coffee. He was trying not to hit the sides of the cup with the spoon but failing every so often and sending out an arrhythmic tinging sound.

‘Maybe he could just sit on the corner of the bed to drink it?' Hayley said. She pulled her right arm out from under the sheet and wrapped it around me. ‘I'm sorry, he's your friend. Or some kind of friend, anyway.' She didn't wait for me to clarify. I didn't want to. ‘I've got to go to the bathroom.'

She lifted her head off the pillow, kissed me again quickly, then slid out of bed.

The clothes from the night before were on the floor, and I picked them up and put them on. Ben was standing at the counter in the kitchen when I opened the bedroom door. He was holding a piece of toast, about to eat it.

‘Lucky we got that upgrade to a three-bedroom place,' he said.

He had the TV on. He was watching a breakfast show, but he had it muted. Sports results were crawling across the bottom of the screen. The clock in the corner said it was eight fifty-five.

‘So, you're on in an hour.' I was going to ignore his remark. Who Weekly was booked in for ten.

The interview had been right out of my head. I felt like I'd stumbled back in from another country, and meanwhile the lie had been festering away and I still had to answer to it.

I could hear Hayley in the en-suite shower. I walked
into the kitchen and poured myself a bowl of cereal. Ben leaned against the counter, eating toast.

‘This is me and my friends playing mini-golf, yeah?' he said.

‘Among other things. You and the suit and the medal, maybe a balcony shot, maybe the beach. And an interview. A sit-down interview, which they will probably record.' I could hear the work script starting to take shape. I was listening to the water fall in the shower, imagining Hayley in there, wanting to be with her, to have my hands on her wet body. ‘Don't be freaked out by the recording. It's so they can quote you properly. It's about accuracy, not about catching you out.' I went to the fridge for the milk. ‘That's the standard spiel, by the way. I tell it to everyone. People get paranoid sometimes when journalists record. So make sure you have a good story to tell, a good consistent story.' The fridge door swung shut. He was looking at me as if he somehow had the better of me, now that I was colluding. ‘Or alternatively confess the whole thing, the whole big lie. What the hell. Clear your fucking conscience.'

I was surprised by how angry I had become, and so was he.

‘This is the second-last one,' he said, steadily. ‘Then it's all over.'

‘Yeah.'

I picked up the TV remote from the counter and unmuted the sound. They were doing two minutes of news headlines at the close of the show.

We were both sitting eating breakfast when Hayley came out of the bedroom in a skirt and singlet top, her
hair still wet, asking if we had any herbal tea. Ben was flicking through cable sports channels.

‘Hey, stunning day outside,' she said, before either of us could give her an answer about the tea.

My phone rang. It was the Who reporter, calling from a cab at Coolangatta airport. Her flight had landed ahead of schedule and she was checking that it was okay to come early.

I followed Hayley into the kitchen. I thought I had seen some tea bags in the pantry.

‘Let me make it for you,' I said to her. ‘If I can find the bags.'

Ben settled on baseball, which I had never known him to like, and turned up the volume. There was no herbal tea, but Hayley said she'd make do with regular. I put the kettle on as she poured her cereal. I saw her look at Ben as he stared at the TV screen, and then past him and out at the tall buildings and the sky. I put my hand on her back and she took it and drew my arm around her.

‘I'm going to have a shower,' Ben said without turning around.

I stepped away from Hayley as he got up. It was an instinctive move. Maybe I wanted her – whatever I had with her – to be his business as little as possible.

He fetched a towel from his bedroom, and some fresh clothes.

‘So, your suit's ready?' I was trying to recall my notes, and the photoshoot plans I'd talked through with Who.

He looked at me, some smartarse remark about to come out. He kept it back. ‘Yeah. It's on the bed. How's this shirt? Not to go with the suit obviously . . .'

He shook it out and held it up for me to see. It was a white T-shirt with rows of old cassettes on it, mock-up mix tapes from the eighties.

‘Yeah, that's good. Start with that and we may well go back to it for the casual shots later. The mini-golf. Maybe just go with that and your three-quarter pants for now. That'll be good for the interview. Not too lawyerish. Everyman. Stylish everyman having some down time.'

‘Cool,' he said, and took the shirt with him into the bathroom.

‘You guys,' Hayley said when the door was shut. ‘I'm not used to this. You dress him now?'

‘Not physically. I want him ready. I have to get him ready. And he needs to be thinking only about the interview.' The story he would tell, the lie. ‘It's my job to think about everything else, and I know more about what their photo plans are than he does. You drip-feed the talent. He gets it all on a need-to-know basis.' I heard the shower start. ‘But I want to forget all about him and his wardrobe for the next few minutes.'

She was poised to pour milk on her cereal. She put the bottle down, put her arms around my neck and kissed me for as long as we could hear water running. The shower finished with a clunk. Hayley's cheeks and chin were blotchy. I didn't want to let her go.