Frankie (2 page)

Don't judge me, bitch. This is a high-stress situation.

I shake my head. ‘We're good.'

The waitress flicks me a half-arsed smile and walks away.

Xavier ignores her.

‘You for real?' He glances my way, so I try out a smile. He shifts further around in his chair. ‘What the fuck, Nate? Why does it have to be now?'

Vinnie's number-one hate is when people come into her shop and order while still on the phone. ‘Yeah, I'll have a – what do you mean you won't be able to make it by six? – kebab with – well, then you'll have to pick up Madysin and Jakwelin from ballet lessons – but no garlic sauce, 'kay?' Those kinds of people get the special sauce.

So what would Vinnie make of Xavier? Looking so much like Juliet would be a massive black mark next to his name in the Book of Vinnie. He didn't thank the waitress when she brought him his coke – another big no-no – but, having met the waitress in question, I'd argue that in this instance it's a grey area.

I reckon if Vinnie were here she'd be kicking me under the table, telling me to get the hell out. She doesn't have a lot of time for Juliet Vega-related things; I'm the one and only exception.

But I'm not sure what
I
think about Xavier. Junkie? Probably not. Liar? Thief? Not enough evidence. The jury's still out on how far this apple fell from the tree.

He hangs up and pockets his phone. ‘Something's come up. I'm real sorry, Frankie, but I gotta go.'

No, wait – jury's in: the kid's a bastard.

I push my plate into the centre of the table and stand, chair scraping. ‘Yeah. I got to go too. Busy, busy, busy.' I rummage through my bag for cash. Why can't I ever find anything in this stupid jumbo-sized backpack? Is there a vortex at the bottom of it?

‘It's my mate,' he says. ‘I owe him. He's calling in a favour so . . .' He frowns at the serviette and keeps blinking, like he's got dust in there. It's weird watching my eyes doing stuff in someone else's face. ‘But we should do this again, hey.'

‘Sure.' Not a chance.

Xavier places two fingers on the serviette and slides it across the table. ‘I really would like to see you again, Frankie,' he says. ‘We never got to . . . Well, maybe I could swing by your shop? Meet Vinnie? You can shout me a kebab, hey.'

I dump a twenty on the table.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from this meeting. It isn't like a date, but then it kind of is. I wanted to be funny, intriguing, intelligent. I didn't want to accidentally spit brownie on him or trip over my own feet and face-plant the pastries. I wanted him to call me later and say, ‘Hey, I had a good time. Let's be brother and sister. Let's fight over the remote. You can call me Pus Face and I'll call you Sarcastitron, Her Royal Bitchiness, and we'll moan about what a fuck-up Juliet is and no one will understand just how fucked up but us.'

I wanted to be impossible to walk away from.

‘How 'bout it?' he asks.

Looking into those black-brown eyes, I get that feeling again. Weird and cool at the same time. And then I look down at the serviette.

It's hard to tell the wrong way up, but I'm pretty sure it's a drawing of me. A nice me, though. A happy me.

Kaboom.

What's that sound? Oh, nothing. Just my heart exploding into a million pieces.

When I look up, he's watching me. Waiting. With dimples.

‘Okay,' I say.

Bouncing to his feet, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a few crumpled notes, dumping them on the table next to mine. ‘Cool,' he says and thrusts out a hand for me to shake.

This time, I take it.

Ten minutes later I'm back home at the unfashionable end of Smith Street. Terry's Kebab Emporium: where kebabs go to die. I'm greeted by the familiar crack that spans the front window. It's like the shopfront is giving me a sleazy, toothless grin.

I walk in and Vinnie's leaning against the front counter, flicking through a magazine. She's calm, not a bleached hair out of place. You'd never guess she'd spent the last couple of hours having a conniption about me meeting up with Xavier.

‘Morning, sweetheart,' she says.

I collapse against the counter with a groan. ‘
Afternoon
, Vinnie.'

Vinnie licks her finger and flicks over another page. Her nails are painted the same shade of red – Vixen Rampage – as her lipstick. ‘Is it afternoon already? Well, I never.'

There are a couple of people in the shop, all of them too busy stuffing their faces with kebab to worry about the domestic unfolding in front of them. Or maybe they're locals, used to looking the other way.

Vinnie's still got her head down and I'm not telepathic so I can't get her to look up simply by thinking it. And I'd
really
like her to look at me so I can launch into a detailed account of
everything
and ask her what she thinks. Is Xavier for real? Is he after money? Is he likely to sell me to sex traffickers for a packet of smokes?

‘I'm starved,' I say instead. ‘Do we have any food? I could score us some
banh mi
.'

‘Nice try, honey, but you're going nowhere. You're still grounded. It's not my fault you wasted your
one
get-out-of-jail-free card meeting up with God Knows Who.'

Finally, she closes her magazine and looks up, giving me The Nonna Sofia: eyes narrowed, lips pursed, a single hand on a cocked hip. We don't live with Nonna anymore, not since she lost her marbles and had to go live at Peaceful Pines Retirement Home, but I can't escape The Look.

‘Whatever,' I say. From the bar fridge under the counter I grab a tub of Vinnie's emergency supply of low-fat yoghurt, rip off the lid and lick it clean. I grab a spork from the canister on top of the bain-marie. ‘You could have had it so much worse.' I spork runny globs of yoghurt into my mouth. ‘You could have –'

‘Don't speak with your mouth full.'

‘– been lumped with a spider-fancying, cockroach-eating serial-killer-in-the-making. So you got a niece who gets expelled from school. Big deal. You've met Steve Sparrow. Tell me
you
don't want to slap his face with the collected works of Shakespeare. I just did what everyone wished they could do. It's called poetic justice.'

She pushes the magazine away. ‘I love you more than life, honey, but I swear to god there are times when I could serve you on a spit.' She jabs a pointed nail at me. ‘And you only got suspended.'

‘Suspended indefinitely. Don't call us, we'll call you.'

It's been two days since The Steve Sparrow Incident and I'm already bored, stuck at home with nothing to do except think about how ‘The Steve Sparrow Incident' would make an excellent band name and how maybe I should learn an instrument so I can form that band. I don't think being able to play ‘Three Blind Mice' on the recorder counts.

Vinnie shakes her head and starts tossing the bowl of lettuce with a pair of tongs. We both know she's not really pissed off about what I did to Steve. Well, she is. Majorly. But right now she's more upset about my meeting with ‘God Knows Who'.

‘She dumped him too,' I say. ‘It's not his fault she's his mum.' I stir the yoghurt. ‘He's nice. Clean. Paid his half. Didn't kill me.'

‘Who's been looking after him then?' She tries keeping her voice casual. She fails.

‘His dad, I think. In Queensland.'

‘You going to be seeing him again?'

I do have a plan. I'm applying the rules of dating. If he contacts me in the next twelve hours I'll know it's a scam – too eager. If he waits twenty-four hours, then it's okay to meet up with him again, but not if he takes longer than three days to text me. Then he's a jerk who doesn't deserve my time.

‘Maybe – maybe I'll see him again.'

‘Well, it won't be tomorrow,' says Vinnie. ‘We're busy.'

Tomorrow is The Meeting – my meeting with Principal Vukovic.

‘Let's not go, Vin. We could skip the firing squad and go get donuts instead.'

I get a laugh. Which is a bonus.

‘Not on your life,' she tells me. ‘This meeting is important. I'll-kick-your-arse-if-you-mess-it-up important. We'll sort this out, and you'll be back at school before you've missed too much of your final year.'

So, no pressure, right? I'll just walk into the principal's office, ‘explain my actions' and all will be forgiven. Then we'll all go unicorn riding.

I put down the yoghurt and grab Vinnie's magazine. ‘Is making up crosswords a job? I could do that.'

‘You need to finish school before you can get a job,' she says. She tries running her fingers through my hair but her nails get tangled in the knots. ‘And uni. Didn't you always want to go to uni?'

I shrug. ‘Uni's overrated. Ian Curtis didn't go and he's, like, the most important human being. Ever.'

‘You've got to focus, Frankie. This is your future we're talking about . . .'

I concentrate on the crossword. The first couple of clues are easy. ‘Progress in Greece initially inhibits four-legged animal'. I scrawl ‘pig' in the little boxes.

‘. . . believe you me, you do not want to be working in this dump forty years from now.'

‘I am the crossword goddess, Vinnie. Goddesses do not need to finish school.'

She snorts. ‘You're the goddess of being a pain in my bum, is what you are.'

We both look up as the bell jangles. Speaking of pigs . . . Detective Inspector Eric Marzoli spills in, shaking off the rain. Now I can play my favourite game: How Long Before Vinnie Threatens to Shove Something up a Cop's Arse. I check the clock above the drinks fridge. And your time . . . starts . . . now!

‘It's crazy out there,' he says. ‘Just saw a Merc almost collide with a tram.'

Vinnie glares at the puddle forming around Marzoli's feet. ‘Everybody drives like a moron soon as the weather gets nasty. Course, you being a cop and all, I guess you could do something about that.'

Ten seconds and counting.

Marzoli runs his hand over the top of his head – thin wisps of hair clumping together in the wet. ‘That's for uniform to sort out.' He looks up at the menu and chooses the Smith Street Gonzales. ‘What the wife doesn't know,' he says to Vinnie with a wink. Half his face has to collapse to make the wink happen.

There's no way this guy has a wife.

‘Nice choice, Detective,' says Vinnie. She smiles. It's thin but passable.

Twenty-three seconds.

Vinnie does a shimmy as she hitches down her skirt and starts on Marzoli's order – lamb, no onion, extra jalapeños.

Marzoli turns my way; his eyes lock onto me like a pit bull's jaws around the neck of a Shih tzu.

‘Shouldn't you be in school?' he says.

‘Isn't that for uniform to sort out?' I drop my gaze to the crossword. ‘Five across. Four letters.' I tap my pen against my lip. ‘Eject backwards first before cutting work in half to make preserved meat.'

The electric knife roars to life as Vinnie starts shaving lamb off the spit. ‘Beats me,' she says. ‘Spam?'

‘Second letter's an “e”.'

Vinnie doesn't bother with gloves, just starts piling on lettuce, tomato and way way too many jalapeños.

Thirty-five seconds. She's doing well.

‘'Fraid I'm not just here for the excellent food,' Marzoli says. He pulls out a little black notebook from his coat pocket. ‘We're canvassing the neighbourhood. There's been a spate of burglaries in the area and we're checking if anyone has seen or heard anything suspicious.'

‘Burglaries?' Vinnie keeps her back to Marzoli.

‘Yup.'

Forty-two seconds.

‘And seeing as though we're open all hours you thought we might have seen something?'

‘Sure,' says Marzoli. ‘That sounds about right.'

‘Pure chance you walked into this shop to ask us questions?' says Vinnie.

Fifty-one seconds.

Vinnie swings around and dumps Marzoli's kebab on the counter. ‘Your Smith Street Gonzales, Detective Inspector. And would you like a stiletto up your arse with that?'

Stop the clock.

Fifty-six seconds being civil to a cop. That's a new record.

Marzoli picks up his kebab. A jalapeño falls out and lands on the counter. ‘Still a charmer, Lavinia,' he says.

‘Nobody calls me that,
Eric
. Now get out of my shop.'

‘How about you, Frankie?' he says. ‘You seen anything?' A thin strip of lettuce hangs from the side of his mouth. He sucks it up. ‘Anybody behaving oddly?'

‘This is Collingwood,' I say. ‘Define odd.'

He smiles. ‘Pity,' he says. ‘Still, we'll get the guy. We always do.' He takes another bite and turns back to Vinnie. ‘Which reminds me: how's your brother, Terry? You manage to get to Port Philip much these days?'

I squeeze the spork in my grip. The reason Uncle Terry is behind bars is standing right in front of us, stuffing his face with
our
kebab. If I were Vinnie I'd have jumped the counter and spiked his eyeball with my Louboutin knock-offs.

‘He sure is lucky he had you to take care of the family business,' says Marzoli. ‘Picking right up where he left off.'

My spork snaps in half. ‘Jerk.'

A jalapeño drops from Marzoli's open mouth and plops on the counter. ‘What d'you call me?'

‘Five across. “Eject backwards first before cutting work in half to make preserved meat”.' I pick up my pencil. ‘J. E. R. K.' I fill in each letter. Slowly. Smoothly.

A smile spreads across Marzoli's face. He shoves the last of the kebab into his mouth, wiping his hands down the front of his jacket. ‘If you remember anything,' he says, removing a business card from his pocket and dropping it on the bench. ‘Number's on there.'

Marzoli ducks through the front door with a jingle, jangle, jingle. ‘Always a pleasure,' he calls over his shoulder.

I turn to Vinnie. ‘A stiletto up the arse, Vin? I thought you told me not every situation needs to be resolved with violence.'

She shrugs.

‘What was that about? Why's Marzoli suggesting we're involved in a bunch of burglaries?'

‘Just the usual cop bullshit. Something happens in this neighbourhood and we're the first port of call. You ought to know that by now. But maybe we should be more careful about locking up. Collingwood types and all that.'

I laugh. ‘Says Her Majesty, Queen of Collingwood.'

Vinnie plants a Vixen Rampage kiss on my forehead. ‘Princess.'