Pants on Fire (32 page)

So she did pay attention in those meetings.

“Don't worry,” I said. “I have an ideas file on my computer. I'll tap it in there and remind you before we go in.”

“Well, it would be nice not to feel completely retarded in an editorial meeting for a change. You and Liinda sit there having brilliantly witty ideas, but when Maxine starts screaming and shouting I just clam up and can't think of anything to say.”

And you sit there looking like you couldn't give a damn, I thought. How easy it is to misjudge people.

“Debbie, on the subject of La Vidovic, can I ask you something?” I wanted to grab my opportunity while I could.

“Someone told me that she used to be madly in love with Jasper O'Connor and stalked him and all that. Do you think she's still in love with him? Should I tell her I've been seeing him, rather than let her find out? She has warned me off him several times . . .”

“Oh, that was hilarious. The way she carried on you'd have thought he was a real catch, although it did get messy in the office and we had to stop using him. I did think that was a bit rough on him actually, because he was a good photographer.”

She let out a bored sigh. I knew she couldn't understand why anyone would possibly want to give Jasper O'Connor a moment's thought, but she struggled valiantly to answer me.

“I don't think she could possibly still be in love with him but she did stalk him pretty heavily. It got pretty ugly.”

She went back to flicking through the slides. I could tell her attention span for other people's problems was running out.

“But I don't think you need to tell her, no. Why open yourself up to all that aggro? And if she does find out you can just tell her it's none of her fucking business, which it isn't. Hey, look at this zit on Linda Evangelista's nose. Needs its own postcode. Excellent.”

 

 

So maybe I didn't need to talk to Liinda about it—good. But what about Jasper? I needed to have things out with him anyway. After his behaviour at Cordelia's I'd seriously cooled off on him. I had let him come home with me after the party, but I hadn't seen him since, and I hadn't returned his last five phone calls. However, I still wanted to know if there was a good reason he hadn't warned me that one of my workmates was liable to have a psychopathic freakout when she found out we'd been seeing each other. And also, my conscience was nagging me a bit—I'd been talking about him to all these other people, surely it was only fair to let him tell his side of the story.

That night I walked round to Caledonia and found him up in the cupola.

“Pinkie, darling,” he said, smiling beatifically and opening his arms. “Is your phone broken? I've called you so many times. Sit down, I've just been watching this amazing 1970s Brazilian film. It was the story of—”

I jumped in before he could get going on one of his endless rambling theories of the universe and his precise place in it.

“I've got a better idea,” I said, sitting opposite him and folding my arms. “Why don't you tell me the story of when my friend and colleague Liinda Vidovic stalked you?”

His ebullinet mood vanished and he got the ugly look on his face I'd seen at Cordelia's party.

“Who told you that?”

“It appears to be common knowledge. Common to everyone but me.”

“So that's why you haven't rung me.” His face contorted with anger and he slammed his fist down on the seat next to him. “I will NOT allow that woman to ruin something else good in my life. She's already fucked up my career and I'm not going to let her fuck this up as well. I really enjoy spending time with you and I won't have her coming back from the grave like Carrie to haunt me.”

“Well, that might be easier to arrange if you tell me about it, Jasper,” I said, keeping my voice low, to try to cool him down. His naked rage scared me a bit.

Jasper's whole face had become a scowling mask. It was hard to believe it was the same one that was so lovably open when it smiled.

“Come on, Jasper. Would you rather I just believed what everyone else has told me, or are you going to tell me your side of the story?”

“Fucking Liinda Vidovic was the worst thing I ever did,” he said, suddenly. “I fucked her once and she fucked up my whole life in return.”

“Wasn't the fact that it was only once the whole problem?”

“Yeah. She seemed to expect me to marry her, just because we'd had one root. I should never have done it, but we got really drunk and stoned one night, at least I did, and we just fell into bed. You know how that can happen . . . But we were really good friends and I thought she knew me well enough to know it was just a one-night stand.”

No wonder he was such good friends with Plonker.

“So what happened after that?”

He lit a cigarette, and I felt so shaken I lit one too. Still horrible.

“Look,” said Jasper, his face returning to its normal contours. “Liinda's been around, she's no country bumpkin, you know that, don't you?”

He looked at me questioningly, not sure how much I knew about her past. I nodded.

“Yes, I know about all that, Jasper.” And the fact that he did too and he still thought she'd be game for a quick shag appalled me. He shrugged.

“OK. So I thought she could handle it. But she behaved like some kind of wronged virgin. I felt like a hunted animal. She used to follow me around Sydney. She was really good at it. I'd look round and there she'd be. I tell you, she should work for ASIO. Or the KGB.”

I had to restrain a smile.

“She used to send me letters,” he continued. “Every day. It was really creepy. And she knew everything about me. She managed to blab her way into every party I was invited to. There were endless silent phone calls and it made no difference if I changed the number, she still got hold of it.” He shook his head at the memories.

“Did you ever consider getting a restraining order?” I asked him.

“I was just about to do that when Commandant Maxine Thane took matters into her own hands. Liinda had deliberately stuffed up a couple of really important jobs we were supposed to be doing together, and apparently she was being a psycho in the office as well. I think it was your friend Lady Muck—Debbie Brent—who told Maxine what was going on in the end. So Maxine told Liinda that if she carried on stalking me she would lose her job instantly, and she told me that I couldn't work for
Glow
anymore. Bye-bye career.”

“But surely you didn't only work for
Glow
.”

He looked a bit shifty.

“Liinda told my other clients a load of lies about me—the worst kind of lies, the ones that contain a grain of truth—and gradually they all stopped hiring me. And when you stop getting your
Vogue
covers it's amazing how fast your advertising work dries up.”

“What kind of little half truths?”

“Oh, stupid shit about me fiddling expenses—when I'd just billed for a few more rolls of film than we'd actually used. I mean, all photographers do that. But when they looked into it, and found that there were a few rolls unaccounted for, they assumed everything she'd told them was true.”

“Are you sure that's the only reason your career . . . slowed up? Did Liinda really have that kind of power?”

I was starting to feel like Angela Lansbury, collating all the facts and trying to work out who really dunnit.

“She's a total witch.”

I wasn't sure I entirely believed him.

“Well, I'm going to have to tell her I've been seeing you,” I said. “She's going to find out anyway—I think it would be better if it came from me.”

“It's up to you. You're the one who has to work with her. I wish you luck.”

He flicked his ciagrette end out of the window and reached for his little tin of grass and cigarette papers. He looked quite relieved it was all out in the open.

“Thanks for telling me all the gory details, Jasper,” I said, standing up. “I'm going now.”

“Don't you want to stick around and have a couple of Js with me?” He smiled his most winning smile.

“No, Jasper. I think you've been really sneaky with me and I don't want to stick around you at all.”

“Well, fuck off then, you snotty English bitch.”

“And a Happy Christmas to you, Jasper.”

As I started down the stairs something crashed into the wall next to me. It was the plastic pineapple ice bucket.

“Grow up,” I shouted back at him and he suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs.

“I don't know what makes you think you're so morally superior, Miss Manners,” he said in a calm, measured voice. “You've been bad-mouthing my mate Nick Pollock all over town for not calling you after you screwed him once, and you haven't returned my last five phone calls after fucking me senseless for the past two months. Men have feelings too you know, Georgia. Put that in your magazine.”

And before I could say anything he went back up into the cupola and slammed the door.

I was shaking when I got home, but told myself it was a good thing I'd finally seen Jasper's true nature. I couldn't believe it was the same guy who'd taken me to a deserted beach and written my name in pink chalk on the pavements of Elizabeth Bay. I was upset by his nastiness, but I wasn't heartbroken. He never meant anything to me anyway, I told myself, and I went to bed to watch a video of
High Society
that he'd recorded for me in our better days. He'd known it was one of my all-time favourites and had stuck a photocopy of Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby round the video box, with our faces pasted over theirs. I threw it on the floor.

But as the familiar story unfolded and I watched my screen heroine, Tracy Lord, deluding herself that she wanted to marry a man she didn't love, I couldn't get Jasper's last words out of my mind. I realised with a sudden jolt that while he'd been leaving flowers on my doorstep and cooking me meals with only pink ingredients, I'd been gadding around town, telling everyone I didn't have a boyfriend and that Jasper O'Connor was just my souce of anonymous sex.

Maybe the one with their pants on fire was really me.

Chapter Nineteen

That Monday morning I went into work full of new resolutions to be open and honest about everything, starting by telling all to Liinda. But somehow when she came back into the office, the first day after her Hawaiian trip, looking quite tanned (she never went near the beach in Sydney) and totally relaxed, I couldn't bring myself to dredge it all up. She was looking happier than I'd ever seen her—she was singing in the office—and I couldn't bear to bring her down.

As the weeks went by I missed Jasper much more than I'd expected to. I missed our spontaneous little jaunts. I missed his funny phone messages and the stupid cartoons he used to fax me at work. For the first time since our road trip I began to feel aware of how alone I was in Sydney.

One particularly homesick Sunday morning I rang Hamish to see when he was coming over and he told me—uncharacteristically bluntly for him—that he'd “cooled off” on the idea, which was very disappointing.

Spending weekends going round Kirribilli market and the Paddington art galleries on my own again, I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. Why was every man I met in Sydney already hopelessly entangled with other people in my life? In London you could go to a party and bingo—you could just meet someone completely unconnected to the rest of your life. But it seemed impossible here.

I knew Antony would just tell me to stop being boring and have another drink if I broached the subject with him, Liinda would suggest I went to Co-dependents Anonymous and Debbie would just look at me blankly, so I decided to ask Zoe about it. Apart from her forays into binge eating, she seemed to be one of the saner people I knew, and certainly the one I had the fewest friends in common with.

“Is there something wrong with me?” I asked her one lunchtime, as we settled down with chicken laksas at our favourite grungy food court. “Or is it normal that the three men I've had flings with since arriving in Australia all have complex relationships with everyone else I know well?”

“It's pretty normal,” Zoe said, ignoring her own food and spearing something out of my bowl with her fork. I smacked her hand. “Apart from blissful holiday romances in Europe, I've never gone out with a man who hasn't previously gone out with someone I know. I went to kindergarten with Ben. He came to my fourth birthday party. Now we are lovers.”

“But how does that happen?” I asked her. “Sydney's a big place . . .”

“Yes, but it's divided up into very distinct sets. Take you—you've arrived here and moved straight into the Eastern Suburbs groovy A list. Fashion, art world, media, some stylish foodies and a few glamorous stockbrokers, that's pretty much it. They all live in Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay, Paddington, Woollahra and Bondi. Right?”

I ran through a mental Rolodex of my friends. “And Surry Hills.”

“OK. And maybe the odd one in Point Piper, but that's it. Now I move partly in that set, because of my job, but I'm really one of the Eastern Suburbs young professionals B list. I've been part of it since I was born. Bellevue Hill, Vaucluse, Rose Bay, Double Bay. We went to school together, our parents all know each other. It's not as glam as your crowd, and it's certainly not as gay, but there's plenty of money in it. That's my scene. Remember how we went out on Mardi Gras night and bumped into a crowd of my friends?”

I nodded.

“You didn't really relate to them at all, did you? You can be honest.”