Almost Perfect

Dianne Blacklock lives south of Sydney, with a family full of males, even the dog, so she has long ago yielded on the toilet seat issue. When she's not writing she goes on rampages through the house, cleaning and emptying out cupboards and making everyone do extra chores. Needless to say, the family prefers it when she is writing.
Almost Perfect
is her third book, and she's currently working on her next.

[email protected]

Also by Dianne Blacklock

Call Waiting
Wife for Hire

DIANNE BLACKLOCK

I've Got You Under My Skin
, words and music by Cole Porter
© 1936 Chappell & Co, Inc, USA

First published 2004 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
This Pan edition published 2005 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
St Martins Tower, 31 Market Street, Sydney

Copyright © Dianne Blacklock 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

Blacklock, Dianne.
Almost perfect.

ISBN 0 330 42182 4.

A823.4

Typeset in Bembo 11.5/13pt by Post Pre-press Group
Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

These electronic editions published in 2007 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
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The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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Almost Perfect

Dianne Blacklock

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For Mum and Dad
Jan and Peter Blacklock

‘ . . .
so deep in my heart
                           you're really a part of me
. . . '

In my last two books I thanked all my family and friends who have helped and nurtured me along the way. My deepest gratitude remains with all of you; you know who you are and I hope you know how much I appreciate you. But I want to take this opportunity to thank some people who specifically helped this time around.

Firstly, thanks must go to my son Joel Naoum, and the lovely Jeska Allan, who always listened, offered feedback and ideas and made me work harder at getting it right. And thanks Joel yet again for being my ‘test' reader.

While I'm at it, I want to thank all my gorgeous sons, Dane, Pat and Zac, as well as Joel, for coping with half a mother (the other half exists in story land while I'm writing). Well, I'm back! . . . for now . . . though I am working on another . . .

Thanks to Desley Hennessy for the initial research that got me started, and to Lynda Bowden for scouring her obstetric textbooks any time I asked.

To the indefatigable Debra Solomon for her patience and generosity scouting locations with me around the northern beaches on a stinking hot day. And for her enthusiasm and support at all times.

To Diane Murray for being the reason all this happened in the first place; and for always being only an email away.

To Frances Short for her unerring support and
belief in me, and for wanting only the first draft for Christmas. Everyone should have such a friend.

To the inimitable Cate Paterson, for so much more than I can say, and to all the lovely people at Pan Macmillan who help put this book together and get it onto the shelves. And Julia Stiles, don't underestimate your contribution.

And finally, I would sincerely like to thank all the readers who have written and emailed me over the last couple of years. I struggled with this book at times, often staring at a blank computer screen thinking, ‘What on earth am I doing?' when an email would arrive. I can't tell you how encouraging that has been. One of the most rewarding aspects of writing is having an audience. Thank you for sharing in my little world and I hope you enjoy this latest offering.

‘I don't know about you, but personally I like a book to be readable first off. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? A book is written to be read, after all. What I mean is, I don't want to have to struggle through it, to feel like my high school English teacher is standing over my shoulder, waiting for a fifteen hundred word essay on the major themes. I want to be entertained. I want to care about the characters, to like them, to feel like I know them, that they might be someone in my family or one of my friends. And I don't want to be able to put the book down. I want to enter into its world and get lost in it, like Alice in Wonderland or somebody. And I want to be sad when I finish it, like I've had to leave a very special place.

‘But
Duck Egg Blue
! Crikey, I mean, I ask you, who wants to read about a woman who's clinically depressed
for the entire book
! She can't get out of bed, she can't do anything. Quite frankly, if she was your friend you'd smack her. But she has no friends apparently, the only other character is her psychotherapist – emphasis on the psycho. If ever there was a case of physician heal thyself . . . So anyway, our heroine fills her days staring at the wall, culminating in a forty page – I counted – discussion with herself about the colour of the said wall and, duh, decides it's duck egg blue, which obviously has some deeper meaning that, frankly, escaped me. And don't get me started on the fridge filled with tubs of plain yoghurt. What the hell was that about? She just stands there for another
God knows how many pages while she debates about which tub to choose, or even whether she wants yoghurt at all? Hello! It's all plain yoghurt there, not much of a decision in it, I would have thought. It really makes you wonder if the writer tried this story out on anyone first, that's if she found anyone who stayed awake long enough to get to the totally pointless and frustrating ending. If you ask me,
Duck Egg Blue
was just stupid.'

Georgie glanced around the room at the faces of the women staring back at her. Some were contemptuous, some bemused. She thought one woman looked relieved, but maybe that was because Georgie wasn't talking any more. She cleared her throat.

‘So, that was four cappuccinos, three lattes, an Earl Grey and one iced tea?'

Georgie retreated back out to the main part of the shop, leaving the Tuesday morning book group to the solace of their own opinions.

‘You did it again, didn't you?' Louise was perched on a stool at the counter checking invoices from a delivery that morning. She lifted her glasses to consider Georgie. The two women had been business partners for over a decade, sisters-in-law for even longer, and friends forever. They'd opened the bookshop out of sheer bravado, or plain ignorance, depending on which way you looked at it.
Hey, we like books, we read books, wouldn't it be fun to own a bookshop!
And with a surname like Reading, they felt it was almost their destiny, a path put in place for them
long before they were even born. Besides they could do something really cute with the name of the shop.

The first years were so lean they could have applied for one of those ticks from the Heart Foundation. But Louise had an entrepreneurial spirit and decided they had to offer something the big chains didn't. The premises they'd leased was a voluminous old store in Dee Why that hadn't had a revamp since it was built some time during the suburban retail boom of the sixties. It had variously been a frock shop, a haberdashery, a caneware emporium, and finally a reconditioned whitegoods outlet that went out of business because their prices really were
The Cheapest on the Northern Beaches!
But the building was too big and impersonal for a bookstore, the place looked sad and empty, and worst of all, uninviting.

And so Georgie's brother Nick was roped in to refurbish the shop. By happy coincidence Nick was also Louise's husband, as well as architecture dropout turned enthusiastic amateur carpenter, as evidenced by the building site they called home. But what he could do with timber, a circular saw and a few tins of paint, would put even the most zealous DIY, home improvement renovation rescue team to shame. Little more than a quarter of the floor space of the shop was cordoned off and Georgie kept the business a barely going concern, while Nick built a new office, an enclosed meeting space for book groups, an enormous toddlers' playpen, a pre-schoolers' story cave, a reading loft for older children, and the centrepiece – literally – a sweeping, curved counter, painstakingly and somewhat obsessively handcrafted
by Nick out of recycled timbers salvaged from the Woolloomooloo finger wharves. It functioned as sales desk around one side and cafe on the other, where coffee, cakes and pastries were served daily. Georgie and Louise added an ‘s' to the original name and The Reading Rooms reopened to a boosted clientele. A cafe in a bookshop was still something of a novelty then, particularly on the northern beaches, and the child-friendly attractions kept the shop busy throughout the otherwise quiet midweek. If people weren't buying books, at least they were buying coffee, and if they didn't come for coffee, they came for the storytelling sessions, or the guest authors, or the special theme days. And then, more often than not, they bought books. These days there was even a waiting list for book groups wanting to hire the meeting room.

‘Like I keep telling you, Georgie,' Louise was saying, with the barest hint of long-suffering in her tone, ‘our customers are allowed to read whatever they please, not everyone has the same taste as you, and as they buy the books from us and rent the room from us, I think they're entitled to do so in peace.' Louise paused, watching Georgie yawn. ‘Am I boring you?'

She shook her head. ‘I'm just tired.'

‘It's only Tuesday.'

‘Trace had a few people round last night.'

‘Not again,' Louise frowned. ‘How many's a few?'

‘I don't know,' Georgie shrugged, loading the espresso machine. ‘I didn't count.'

‘More than six?'

Georgie nodded, lining up cups.

‘More than ten?' Louise persisted.

Georgie nodded again, trying unsuccessfully to stifle another yawn.

‘More than twenty?'

Georgie crouched down, ostensibly to get milk from the fridge under the counter, but mostly to avoid eye contact with Louise. ‘Probably.'

‘God, she's having parties on a Monday night now?'

‘Crazy, isn't it?' Georgie agreed, standing up again. ‘The only night there's anything worth watching on the telly and she has a party. I mean, everyone knows Monday's a three VCR night. Oh, by the way, did you remember to tape
Alias
for me?'

‘Stop avoiding the issue,' said Louise bluntly.

Georgie looked suitably chastened.

‘You have to do something about her. This is what happens when you pick up strays, Georgie.'

She was about to say that it wasn't very kind to call Tracey a stray, but unfortunately there was a fair element of truth in it. Tracey had shown up at the shop one day asking for a job, barefoot, dressed in a sarong and a bikini top, with hair that looked as though it hadn't seen a brush or a comb in a week. Call her fussy, but Louise took a dim view of hiring people who presented themselves for work sans footwear, so she told Tracey they had no positions available, despite the notice on the front window asking for a casual shop assistant. It was old, out-of-date, Louise had explained, they could not afford to take on extra staff at this time, she went on, all the
while standing on Georgie's foot to stop her from blurting out the truth. But Tracey was not easily put off; what she lacked in presentation, she made up for in persistence. She pitched a rather flimsy ‘woe is me' story at them and Georgie raced forward eagerly to catch it, like some desperate single woman at a wedding as the bride tosses the bouquet. Tracey insisted she needed the job because she like,
had
to move out of home because her parents like,
so
didn't understand her. And then Georgie exclaimed that the thought had crossed her mind
that very morning
that it might be fun to have a flatmate. It was clearly fate! Louise had promptly dragged Georgie into the office and pointed out to her that they hardly knew this girl, but what little information they did have suggested she would be a highly unsuitable flatmate as she did not meet even the most basic criteria, to wit, an ability to pay a share of the rent. Georgie's response was one of hapless resignation – there was nothing she could do about it now, she'd already asked her. And it was better than advertising in the paper, where she might end up with an axe murderer, or worse. Louise had tried to use logic to dissuade her, but logic never really worked with Georgie. In the end Tracey's parents, who were obviously as keen for Tracey to move out as she was, paid her first two months rent in advance, deposited her stuff at Georgie's the same weekend, and rather expeditiously moved to Queensland.

‘Georgie, she's using you, and she'll go on using you as long as you let her,' Louise persisted.

‘It'll be okay,' Georgie assured her as she jiggled
a pitcher of milk under the steam nozzle. ‘She's got another interview this week, and she promised after that . . .'

But Louise wasn't listening any more. She had chosen instead to bang her head repeatedly on the counter top.

The problem lay in the fact that Georgie had a naive belief in the goodness of her fellow man. Because she was pathologically honest herself, she trusted everyone else at face value. This meant that she went through her life with a great big sign on her forehead that read SUCKER. It had landed her in trouble before. Tracey was not the first stray she'd ever picked up. That habit had started when she was just a little girl and she used to bring dogs and cats home on a regular basis. Her mother discovered eventually that most of them were not strays at all, and Georgie was forbidden to bring any more animals home.

So she moved on to people. She made friends with anyone and everyone. Talked to people on buses and trains, and yes, had been known to bring home the odd – the very odd – desperate soul who had once again cast their line into Lake Gullible and reeled Georgie in. Her father had finally put his foot down when he'd found a couple of homeless men camped out in their garage. No one could fault Georgie's sense of compassion, she just had to find more appropriate, and possibly less perilous ways to express it.

So she went to work for the RSPCA in the school holidays, but she couldn't bear that animals
had to be put down, and as her parents did not want to turn their home into an animal shelter, she had to leave. Then she volunteered at a hospital in the children's ward and was so sad she cried herself to sleep every night. Clearly Georgie was overwhelmed by the plight of others up close and personal. So she took an after-school job as a waitress and never felt happier. The customers adored her. Soon she had her regulars who came in knowing they'd always get a smile from Georgie, that she would never forget how they took their coffee, that she would keep aside the type of muffin they liked or the last piece of their favourite cake.

Georgie started to dream of having her own cafe one day. It was not an ambitious dream, but it was a vexing one. Nick was already at uni and her sister Suzanne was certain to make dux of the school, which meant, as everyone kept saying, ‘Zan will be able to do anything she wants.' With a successful architect as a father and two brainiacs for siblings, running a cafe might be considered a little ordinary. By the same token Georgie had a suspicion that as the youngest, not much was expected of her. In fact she even wondered if her family would think that running a cafe was beyond her rather meagre abilities. Not Georgie's mother, of course. She had a fervent, even myopic belief in the potential of all her children, regardless of any evidence that may have suggested otherwise.

Gillian Reading was a vibrant, quixotic, rollercoaster ride of a woman who approached motherhood like she did everything else in her life,
paying as little heed to convention as she could possibly get away with. Growing up, Georgie had vivid memories of being hurried outside whenever it rained so they could cleanse their auras, at least until the three of them came down with the flu after a particularly bad storm in the middle of winter when Gillian had pulled the door shut and locked them all out accidentally. And then there were the picnics on a bluff overlooking the ocean at midnight on the full moon, including the time Nick went missing and they couldn't find him in the dark and they had to call the police, who had to call in the rescue squad, which was all pretty exciting when Nick retold it to friends as they signed his plaster cast. And of course there were Gillian's many ‘projects'. Like when they spent the afternoon painting a mural on the living room wall to surprise Dad, unfortunately ruining the carpet in the process. Their father had certainly been surprised, but the most negative reaction Georgie had ever witnessed from him was a shake of the head accompanied by a resigned sigh.

Malcolm Reading had been an architect of some note. The
Architectural Digest
had referred to him as ‘this decade's most innovative practitioner', but you'd never have guessed it looking at him. He was a tall, handsome man, but understated, even reserved. Gillian and Malcolm were like Yin and Yang, the perfect balance to each other. Their whole family was perfect. It was not like anyone else's family that Georgie was aware of, but it was perfectly suited to them.

That was until her sixteenth year, when her
father ruined everything. When her wonderful, loving, extraordinary family disintegrated before her eyes. A year that ended with Georgie and Zan and Nick burying both their parents on the same day.

‘Oh, while I think of it,' Louise said, watching Georgie arrange the cups onto a tray. ‘Nick wanted to know if you have any special requests for Thursday night's menu.'

‘Thursday night?' Georgie frowned.