Nine Days (5 page)

I don’t know why she’s telling me these things. I don’t
know why she’s here. More worrying is that I don’t know why I’m here.

Eventually our time is up and I feel like I’ve felt for months now: like a child listening to the teacher drone on, then hearing the bell ring and knowing I can finally go home. My heart leaps; I can actually feel it, giving a little hop in its cage. This may be a tell-tale sign that all is not well on the career-satisfaction index.

Violet slips her shoes on and makes her appointment for next week. As we say goodbye she says, as she always does, I
feel better after our talk, Stanzi.
I wave as the lift doors close then hobble back to my office.

It’s best to write up my notes now. I make a coffee in the communal kitchen amid the dirty mugs from the dental practice next door. I need some sugar to concentrate so I have a few biscuits from the packet in my desk drawer. Seeing Violet always makes me hungry. I’ve been in the game long enough to understand the power of suggestion.

Word association: Violet.

Crumble.

Where have all those biscuits gone? I went to the trouble yesterday to buy the ones with the cream filling, the revolting ones that taste like sweetened parmesan, in order to slow down their consumption and what has that achieved? I have struggled through an entire packet of cream biscuits I didn’t like when I could have had cake. Sacrifice, without any reason or benefit. Life is too short for cream biscuits. I could be trapped in a collapsing skyscraper tomorrow and it would have all been a tragic waste of calories.

Today I have been productive. I’ve seen my usual assortment of middle-class, white, usually-but-not-always women with a giddying assortment of suburban problems that usually boil down to this one thing:
I’ve always been a good girl but the world has not kept its side of the bargain. When I was younger, I thought it’d be different. I thought something would happen. I would be richer, or prettier, or more famous, or more powerful.
Or (and this one seems exclusive to women),
I’m angry. I feel this rage come out of me and I’m so fucking angry I could break my fist through a wall. It can’t be my family that makes me this furious. I love them. I live for them. But I don’t know who else I could be angry at, or for what.

They cannot keep the anger in, these women: they drink too much, they shoplift, they sleep with their doubles partners, they scream at their children, they pay someone to take a knife to their eyes or breasts or stomach. They turn the anger inward and develop a depression so deep they cannot get out of bed. The women come to my office and talk to me for a while and they feel better. And when they’re talking to their friends and to their husbands they can say
my counsellor says,
so everyone knows it’s not just them, it’s not just some need to talk about
me me me.
It’s a real problem and they have a real counsellor to prove it.

It’s only later, when I ease my feet out of my Mary Janes and into my sneakers for the hike to the car, check my appointments for tomorrow and pack my handbag, that I notice my father’s coin is missing.

As soon as I’m in the car, I dial Charlotte, quickly, before she leaves the shop and I have to wait until she cycles home to Rowena Parade. She refuses to carry a mobile in case the radiation kills off her brain cells. I suspect that ship has already sailed.

Some hippy answers the phone and, as usual, I wait, because in hippyland, as Einstein said, time is relative: Charlotte and I may have been born six minutes apart, but sometimes it feels like six years. She is with a customer or sweeping the floor with a broom made from free-range straw that died of natural causes or singing Kumbaya to the wheatgrass so it is karmically aligned. Finally, she’s on the phone and, as carefully as I can manage, I ask her.

‘You want to know
what?’

I sigh. ‘The year of the shilling. What was it?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m considering doing a PhD on the random distribution of pre-war shillings in Melbourne suburbs.’ The traffic is nightmarish. I dart around a car turning right and nearly sideswipe a truck. Times like these, I need a siren.

‘Isn’t it back from the framer’s yet? They said they’d only take a week.’

‘Yes. That’s why I’m calling. Because it’s back. It’s in front of me. They’ve done a beautiful job. Polished wood trim, set in green velvet. Just like we discussed.’

‘You haven’t even taken it yet. Have you.’

At the lights, I look over to a bovine woman in the next car. She is staring straight ahead, chewing her cud, hair a colour unknown in nature. She doesn’t notice me. When
the lights change, she pulls in front of me with the oblivious insouciance of the entitled. ‘Not as such,’ I say.

In the background I can hear shop noises: the soft voices of calm people speaking, a knocking sound, metal sliding against metal. ‘I told you I’d do it. I told you I’d cycle over in my lunch hour and pick it up and then ride over to the framer’s.’

‘And I told you it’s easier if I did it. I have a fossil-fuelburning vehicle and no regard for the level of pollution I generate.’

‘If you haven’t taken it to the framer’s yet, you can just read the year on the shilling.’

There’s nothing for it. I explain, almost accurately, about my difficult client and her predilection for nicking stuff and the trials of my life in general.

‘I see,’ she says, and I’ve known her my entire life so I know exactly what
I see
means. ‘It’s obvious what needs to be done.’

‘What?’ I pull over into a side street off Glenferrie Road, take the phone out of the clasp and press it to my ear. I brace myself.

‘Violet is a troubled name. Bad feng shui. It’s too close to “violent”. She should change it. Maybe Viv, Viv’s a nice name. Vivian. Sounds like vivacious. Then she can keep her initials. Except if her last name ends with an oh en. Vivian Morrison. Vivian Davidson. That wouldn’t work. Vanessa would be OK. Another fun name. Risqué. Vanessa the undresser.’

‘Wow. Thanks. Could we focus on the coin for now and leave the issue-solving to me? I’m trained. I’m the professional.’

‘Are you absolutely sure she’s taken it? It’s not somewhere under your desk?’

I can feel my lips tighten, my eyes narrow. She means,
you’ve knocked it off the desk without noticing.
She thinks my spatial awareness is so poor that my brain doesn’t know what my hip is doing. That I’m a bumbling, fumbling, bumper of shelves, an elbower of glasses, a jostler of knicknacks. Clumsy. I lean back on the headrest. I want a new car, with bench seats and fins and a wheel big enough to steer the
QEII.
Why is everything in my life so tiny and mean?

‘Oh. My. God. You’re right. As usual. It’s fallen under my desk. I’m a complete idiot who doesn’t even know if she’s had a priceless family heirloom stolen out from under her nose. It’s a miracle I’m still alive because with my IQ, I could have forgotten to breathe by now.’ I contemplate putting on my hazard lights.
Warning! Approach driver at your own risk!
‘Do you know the year of the coin or don’t you?’

‘I still don’t understand why you—’ She shrieks like something bit her. ‘Stanzi. Oh no.’

‘Oh no,
what?’

‘You can’t just replace it with another coin. It belongs to Dad. It’s got to be that exact one.’

‘Charlotte. It’s just a coin. I’ll find another one from the same year in one of those shops in Flinders Lane.’ Silence. ‘Charlotte? Charlie?’

‘You will absolutely not be replacing it.’

For God’s sake. How did I come to be related to the karma police? ‘Look. He’ll never know.’

‘That’s not the point. How can you not see that’s not the point?’

‘It’s a unit of currency formerly in common circulation. It’s
not the Ark of the Covenant. They made millions of them. Their own mothers couldn’t tell them apart.’

Then she lands the killer blow. ‘I’m very disappointed,’ she says, and I can imagine the corners of her eyes drooping. Considering the ‘very’, her lips might have gone too.

‘All right, all right. I’ll go around to Vivian’s place. Violet’s. I’ll get it back.’

‘Stanzi. If it’s a different coin, I’ll know.’

After she hangs up, I sit for a moment with the phone warm in my hand. I imagine the soundwaves that have pumped through the air, threaded between the molecules of the metal of my car, vibrated along the street where they’ve joined up with more soundwaves from other phones that flood across the whole city, an invisible lattice, a web of messages. And what are these earth-shattering missives, enabled by squillions of dollars and countless hours spent developing this technology?
Do we have any pesto
and
I’m on the train
and
Don’t forget to tape
Sex and the City.

I think back to when we were small, to our teenage years and our twenties. If anyone asks, I always say
this twin business in nonsense.
Or
if I had a psychic connection to my sister, believe me, I’d know—don’t ask me how, I’d just know.
Or
you pronounced ‘psychotic’ wrong.
All those things she seemed to know: that time I broke my arm playing soccer and rang home and couldn’t get Mum because she had taken Charlotte to the hospital with a mysterious pain in the same arm. Or that time at uni I’d broken up with the boy I thought was
the one,
and came home to find she’d stocked the freezer with five different flavours of ice-cream.

Coincidence and the power of suggestion, fairy stories for weak-minded people. A complete load of rubbish.

The address in Violet’s file is a flat in Kew—beige neo-Edwardian slash faux-Georgian with black wroughtiron gates and no eaves and ivy trained up the front wall. I’ve driven around the block twice but I can’t get any closer so I park and scoff a tiny Mars Bar I found in the glove compartment. You need a magnifying glass and tweezers to eat a Mars Bar these days, thanks to those multi-national bastard companies and their cynical profit-mongering diminution of formerly normal-sized confectionery.

I had no choice. I had to come here. If I call and convince her to return the coin, I won’t see it for another week. Dad will realise it’s gone by then. Mum will smile and say,
Stanzi. Dear. Do you think you should have let Charlotte do it? We know how busy you are.
Which is Motherian for
your sister loves us more than you do, and what’s more, you’re a bad daughter.
Or maybe he already knows it’s gone. Mum’s hopeless with secrets. Or worse: the doctors are wrong and the pacemaker doesn’t work. This won’t be much of a get-well present if he doesn’t last long enough to get it.

At the front door, I’m in luck. A pizza delivery guy has been buzzed in and he holds the door open so I don’t have to declare myself over the intercom. We go up in the lift and all I can smell is pepperoni and melted cheese, oily and sharp and utterly compelling. Pizza smell is like radioactive waste: it’s
probably seeped into the fabric of my clothes and I’ll have to dry-clean everything, otherwise every time I wear this outfit I’ll be starving. It’s after seven and I’ve had nothing but a banana and a skim latte, then a muffin at eleven. It’s all right for mung-bean Charlotte. I have an efficient metabolism. Back in the cave, she would have been dead halfway through the first hard winter. The pizza guy gets out of the lift alive, with the box. He doesn’t know how lucky he is.

I follow him along the tasteful corridor to Violet’s apartment. Violet and pizza does not make sense. I hang back in a non-threatening manner and catch my breath but, when the door opens, it isn’t her. It’s a man in his early forties, short hair greying at the temples. He’s in excellent shape; he stands the way fit people do, like their muscles could keep their body erect all by themselves, no bones required. I see sinews taut at the front of his throat. People who work out are so gullible. They think they’ll live longer. Well, good luck to them. It’s a shame most of them aren’t bright enough to realise that the extra time added to their life when they’re eighty and too old to do anything productive with it is roughly equal to all the time wasted in the gym when they’re young and capable of having fun.