Flesh & Blood Read online

  I inhaled sharply. Whoops, I thought. I didn’t want to get Henry into trouble. “I don’t know,” I answered hurriedly. “I don't have it on me. Sorry if I seem… out of it. I’m just confused.”

  “That makes two of us,” James said honestly. “Is there anything else I can do for you, seeing as I’m unable to help you with that meeting?”

  “No, that’s fine,” I said, and then thanked him, hung up, and stood in the middle of the empty atrium like an idiot.

  Just... what? Why would Henry be calling me in the middle of the night to tell me about meetings that didn’t exist? He’d certainly believed it existed, that much was clear, so it couldn’t have been his fault. I tabbed through to my email and I opened the letter he’d sent me on Friday night so I could read through it more carefully than I had at midnight. It was very specific about the meeting being today, at this time and here. I scrolled down to check who it was signed by, and the name made me even more confused. Printed down the bottom of the page was, ‘Signed on behalf of James Chen, Assistant HR Manager’.

  But I was just speaking to him, I thought. Literally, he told me he doesn't know about it, and his staff clearly aren't getting involved in my complaint, and Henry would be the only other person who would have authority to sign things on behalf of James, unless James is lying and—

  My eyes fell on the painting that had been hung in the atrium, and suddenly a piece of the puzzle fell into place: Sean Frost. Henry wasn't allowed to access my file: that's why I’d complained to Sean about Jason in the first place. Sean was the next manager above James who had access to my personnel records, and Sean was the next manager above Henry who'd have the authority and the signature files to sign on behalf of James.

  My hackles rose. The bastard, I thought, the fucking bastard. Sean must have created this mess: a fake letter for a fake meeting. After all, he’d made Henry believe he was attending, hadn’t he? Somehow Henry had gotten his hands on that letter and, even though he wasn’t supposed to be involved with my file, he’d forwarded it to me and called me about it. I didn’t feel good about this, because I was standing here, wasn’t I? I’d shown up for the fake meeting. I did not feel good about this at all. I needed to get out of this evil fucking building ASAP.

  I went all the way up George Street to wait for lunchtime, and I was still trying to piece it all together when Sarah and Gemma came out to eat with me. They listened as I explained what had happened, and then they looked at each other, mystified.

  “Why do you think he would do something like that, though?” Gemma wondered aloud.

  “Because he’s an asshole,” I said, quoting Henry. I could hardly eat, I was still so wound up. “And Henry’s going to feel fucking awful when he realises what’s happened. I finally have a legitimate reason to text him and I don’t even want to break it to him.”

  “Yeah, but the stuff Sean did to you over the pitch was for something, so what’s this for?” she asked between bites of her focaccia. “Do you think he did it just to mess with you, or…?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he’s still angry with me about the fact I managed to get that pitch through.”

  “Maybe it’s not even about you,” Sarah suggested, still looking as uncharacteristically pale as she had this morning. “Because it started with Henry, don’t forget.”

  I felt uneasy about that idea. “I hope not, because I don’t really care about Sean messing with me,” I said, “but Henry’s dealing with heavy stuff at the moment and he’s—”

  “—a grown adult,” Sarah reminded me, stabbing critically at her salad. “He’s a great guy, I get it, I like him a lot. But you broke up with him, Min. You need to let go. This is only your problem to the extent that Sean is fucking with you, too.”

  It was difficult to just ‘let go’ when my own mother was driving Henry out of his home, though, wasn’t it? I opted not to tell them about that.

  Sarah interrupted my teeth-grinding by making a frustrated noise and pushing away her salad. “I swear to god,” she announced, “I am actually dying. I can’t even eat a garden salad, I feel like I’m going to vomit all over everyone.”

  “Charming,” Gemma said, but she was smiling. “Maybe it was something you ate?”

  I had a thought. “I hope it wasn’t Bree’s cooking.”

  Sarah put her head in her hands. “You ate that, too,” she pointed out. “No, I swear, I am dying. My body is like, ‘Sarah, you’ve had too much alcohol and too many drugs and now it’s time to die’. Ugh!”

  Gemma reached over and rubbed her back. “You just need a holiday,” she said optimistically. “Come on, didn’t you want to go to Thailand and Cambodia and all that? You should take all that leave you have saved. We can go together, those places are supposed to be amazing. It’ll be so much fun!”

  “Hah,” Sarah said loudly from her forearms, “annual leave, that’s for people who want to be on boring investment projects for the rest of their marketing careers. Nah, I’ll save my holidays for a big payout when I quit in a couple of years. You know, if I don’t die of everything first.”

  “Oh…” Gemma looked a bit deflated. “Well, the offer stands,” she said, and kept rubbing Sarah's back.

  Sarah didn’t lift her head straight away, even though there was a pronounced silence while Gemma and I glanced nervously at each other. She didn’t usually complain, and she certainly wasn’t a fan of people fussing over her, and that made me worry about how bad she actually felt. “Seriously, Sarah, be careful,” I warned her. “I made myself pretty sick trying to be the model employee at Frost.”

  Sarah looked up from her arms. “Yeah, but you’re the World’s Most Anxious Person,” she pointed out. “You don’t count.” She groaned and put her head back in her hands. “I’m getting old, I need to stop drinking so much.”

  Since Sarah wasn’t going to eat her food, we paid for everything and then wandered slowly back downhill towards Frost HQ. Sarah was still complaining and hanging off Gemma. “Save me from my project,” Sarah whinged, shaking her. “Save me! I’m going to vomit all over my spreadsheets.”

  I was watching her closely. “We can’t help you with your spreadsheets,” I told her, and then, figuring I’d be driving past anyway, added, “But I’m meeting Bree at Cloverfield at about 6, so I could pick you up at around 6:30, 7ish if you want a ride home.”

  “Oh my god, this is why I keep you around,” she told me with exaggerated appreciation, and defected from Gemma for a few seconds to hug me around the middle. It was something that Bree often did, and it was weird to have Sarah doing it. I pretended to ruffle Sarah’s hair the way I did Bree’s curls, and she hissed and batted my hands away.

  “In your dreams, Toyboy,” she said, giving me a weak grin, and then draping herself all over Gemma again. “But I will totally take you up on that lift if you promise to keep your hands to yourself.”

  I waved goodbye to them at the front entrance of Frost HQ and watched them disappear through the turnstiles and up into the lifts. This place, I thought, shaking my head and looking at my uncredited painting in the atrium.

  SIX

  Bree was late.

  I was bothered because people being late always bothered me, but also because I’d made a decision during the day that ‘when I had a minute by myself’, I would let Henry know the meeting was a hoax so that he didn’t have to hear it from Sean or James. I checked the clock on the dash: I’d already had nine minutes by myself sitting parked outside Cloverfield, and it was getting to the point where ‘Bree might come any second’ didn’t justify me not doing it anymore. I sighed heavily. No more excuses, I thought, and then made a decision to leave Henry a voicemail rather than a text. Henry always read his texts in meetings and I didn’t want to interrupt his meeting with further breaking news about Sean being a fuckhead.

  Rather than risk talking myself out of it by meticulously planning my every word, I just dialled Henry’s number, listened to his friendly recording and then tried to explain in 30 seconds
what happened. After the beep had cut me off, I couldn’t remember what I’d said which at least meant I didn’t have to agonise over it. Leaving the voicemail made me angry at Sean again, though, and so I sat fuming in the driver’s seat as I waited for Bree.

  I was deep in a fantasy about Frost going bankrupt when my phone buzzed in my lap. For a couple of seconds, I thought it might be Henry, but then I saw ‘Bree’ on the screen and exhaled. She was probably going to tell me how much more late she was going to be. I answered it. “If you’re not calling to beg for my forgiveness I’m going to hang up on you.”

  “Sorry, the clock in the library is slow!” she said, but she definitely didn’t commit to it. “Could you get out of the car for a sec? I can’t see where you’re parked.”

  Why was she…? “Okay…” I said slowly, and followed her instructions. I could have just told her where I was parked, it wasn’t that dark yet…

  I spotted some frantic waving as soon as I closed the door. “Hey!” The phone hung up in my ear. Bree was standing near the gate with a couple of other girls and calling out. Then, with her enormous bag slung awkwardly over one shoulder, she came galloping over to me. Her friends followed at a more subdued pace.

  She dropped her bag at my feet and pulled me down by my tie into a very exaggerated kiss, and then stood back and looked me up and down. She had a big smile plastered across her face as she reverently brushed down my lapels and straightened my tie.

  When her friends arrived at my car, they kept glancing at each other and trying not to giggle as Bree introduced them. “Is that your car?” one of them asked a bit shyly about my Lexus. The other one elbowed her.

  I glanced back at it and then grinned down at her. “Why, do you like it?”

  “Oh my god,” Bree’s friend said under her breath, and then giggled. She couldn’t even make eye contact with me after that.

  When they’d gone, Bree wrapped her arms around my middle and beamed up at me, smiling ear-to-ear.

  I rested my arms on her shoulders. “Can I get back in my car now?”

  “Not yet,” she said, and stood hopefully up on her very tiptoes, coaxing me down into a sweeter, gentler kiss. By the end of it, she could hardly kiss me properly because she was smiling so much. She brushed the tip of her nose with mine. “Okay, now you can. Let me just get my tablet out.”

  I scoffed. “Get in,” I told her, nodding inside. “You can get it out on the way to the station.”

  “It’s like two streets away,” she protested, but she was still smiling as she rounded the car and climbed into the passenger side with her huge bag on her lap, taking her sparkly tablet out and very carefully placing it on the back seat.

  The station really was two streets away, and we got there far too quickly. I’d been waiting around in the city all day to meet her, and it was a little while before I had to pick Sarah up. I didn’t want to say goodbye to her just yet. She didn’t get out straight away, either, she just sat there with her hand over mine on the gearstick, content. Her skin was warm.

  “Well,” I prompted her. “Aren’t you going to tell me what your English teacher said?”

  She looked up at me. “Oh!” she said as she remembered. “Yes!” She withdrew her hand and went rummaging through her full bag for her mobile. After spending a few seconds flicking through her gallery, she leant over to me to show me a photo. It was a very staged picture of a middle-aged lady with her hand on her cheek pretending to look really surprised. “We had to email them to her before class, so I kind of missed the moment and asked her if she’d recreate it for you.”

  I held the phone so I could see the picture better. It was terrible, the teacher could not act, and I had to laugh. “I can’t believe she did that. My teachers wouldn’t have.”

  Bree accepted the phone back from me. “Yeah! She’s really cool. She’s always been okay, it’s just that she’s super strict and kind of scary. She even said she read the first paragraph of my essay to check it wasn’t a rush job and she was really impressed, and when I told her you got me to do it, she’s like, ‘Ask him what his secret is because I’ve been trying to get you do your homework on time for years to no avail’.”

  “I hope you didn’t reveal my secret magical powers.”

  “No,” Bree giggled. “I said you look better in a suit.”

  I cringed. “You didn’t, Bree.”

  “I did! And I said you’re cute, and you’re funny, and you’re a great kisser…” At my pained expression, she added, “Okay, not the last one. But yeah... She said if I kept going I was heading for an ‘F’. She was just joking, though, and everyone in the class thought it was hilarious.” Since Bree thought I was so good at it, I let her kiss me a couple more times. “How was your meeting-thing that you needed to wear your totally hot suit to, anyway? What’s happening to the complaint?”

  I grimaced and gave her the abridged version of the hoax meeting saga. “So, yeah, the jury is out on why Sean did it,” I finished, making a face. “Henry’s going to be really upset and angry when he finds out. Maybe he’ll know why, at least.”

  Bree shrugged. “Some people are just fucked up and there isn’t a ‘why’,” she said, “I should know, I’m related to one of them.” She then fixed me with glare and pointed her index finger sternly. “You need to tell Henry.”

  I gave her a tired look. “Yes, Bree, I know. I left him a voicemail already.”

  She stopped pointing. “Really? Already?” She looked pleasantly surprised.

  I sighed at her. “I’m not that bad.” I neglected to mention that I’d only done it ten minutes ago.

  She wrinkled her nose. “You’re pretty bad normally, you can never give people bad news,” she told me as she relaxed back into her seat.

  We sat quietly and watched people spilling out of the station for a little while, and then Bree turned her head back to me. “I had a really great day,” she said eventually. “With that group thing I was doing just before, those girls were kind of annoyed to be put with me last week because everyone knows what I’m like. So before school started today, I did all the reading for the class and I wrote down a couple of ideas about what we could do for our project, and when I told them they were like, ‘Wow, that’s actually good!’” She was smiling again. “And everyone loves my tablet, no one else has a really sparkly one. I was sitting there in class looking at what people were using, and mine’s the prettiest.”

  I threaded my fingers through the soft wispy curls at the back of her neck. I could listen to her talk like this all day. “Well, it belongs to the right person, then.”

  Her face looked like it was about to crack in half from all that smiling. She watched me thoughtfully for a little while, before her smile faded and she asked a bit hesitantly, “Do you… want to drop me home?”

  My eyebrows went up. That was a first. “I thought you weren’t allowed to have people around?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not, but there won’t be anyone home yet, so no one will know. Besides,” she said, “you already know we have no money, so if there’s, like, a sheriff’s calling card wedged in the front door or there’s red envelopes spilling out of the mailbox I don’t have to come up with some story about it.”

  I put the car into first. “Are you sure?” I asked her gently before I pulled away from the kerb.

  It was difficult to read her voice. “9 Christmas Court,” she told me, and that was her answer. I punched it into my GPS and let the car direct us there.

  She sat back in the seat as we drove, watching me. At one point, she giggled. “You look excited.”

  I made a face. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay,” she told me. “I was when I saw your house for the first time.”

  “When you barged your way in, you mean.”

  She looked very guilty. “Worth it,” she declared. “So, what do you think it looks like? Like, when you imagine where I live?”

  I laughed at her. “I don’t know,” I said honestly, and then looked a b
it guilty myself. “I did Street View some parts of Bellevue Hill to see what the area is like.”

  She looked absolutely delighted. “Really?” she said, and then put her hand over mine on the gearstick again as we kept driving.

  I don’t know what I imagined; maybe a big, affluent-looking house, the kind that had two storeys with a double driveway. That’s what I’d seen of the suburb on Google Maps. When we pulled into Christmas Court and outside the front of Bree’s house, it wasn’t like what I’d imagined, not at all. It was just a narrow red brick townhouse nestled at the end of a quiet, leafy court. It was modest and unimpressive with its mossy roof tiles and peeling awnings, but there was something warm about it. It had character. I could understand why Bree said her mother had fallen in love with it: it looked like the type of house someone bought to raise kids and then grow old in.

  My windows were tinted and it was getting quite dark outside, so I wound them down to see better. The pink sunset was reflecting off the second-storey windows. “It’s beautiful,” I told Bree. “The garden looks really nice, too.”

  She brightened. “Thank you!” she said, and then she looked back out at it somewhat critically. “The hedges kind of need a trim, and probably some of those weeds could come out too, but yeah, you should see it in early summer when all the roses bloom. They’re white and they look so pretty against the red bricks.”

  We both sat quietly for a minute or two admiring her house, and then she turned slowly back to me, eyes veiled. After a moment of struggling with the words, she said quietly, “We’re going to lose it soon, you know.”

  That knocked the wind out of me; Bree. I reached across between us and took her hand, holding it between mine and looking into those big, soulful eyes. There wasn’t anything I could say to that, so I didn’t try.

  She didn’t speak straight away, either. I kept stroking her hand until she took a little breath and asked, “Do you want to come in, too?”