A Hand in the Bush. Jane Clifton
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fact that there were two of them, parallel, bowed and tapered in all the usual places, and for the fact that the lower was slightly fuller which sometimes gave the impression of pouting-which she didn't-required no lipstick: at a dinner party, it just ended up on the hosts' cheeks and her wineglass.
She had an endearing and, her acupuncturist assured her, 'very lucky' gap between her front teeth which one day, she promised herself, she would have orthodontically closed.
A black mole which half a century ago would have been called a beauty spot, but in these ozone-layer-like-a-Swiss-cheese times was more likely to indicate a spot of bother, perched on the lower left of her jawline. It gave the appearance of her having spilled a raisin from her muesli, or of an inverted exclamation mark, situated beneath one of the two creases that had grooved themselves like parentheses around her mouth.
Just enough time to attack her hair with the irons, she thought, noting how even forty-somethings were not immune to the global Jennifer Aniston hair syndrome. A liberal douse of Chanel and she was ready. For what? Diversion, she reiterated.
As she reached out to call for a taxi, the phone rang.
'Hey, Decca, it's Candy.'
'Hi.'
'Look, I know you're on your way out, but, remember the girl on the bridge?'
'You said you met the mother once, right?' Decca did not wish this to be a long conversation.
'Yeah, I did,' she said. 'But it seems Jorel knew Jody, the girl.'
'Shit. How?'
'She had a part-time job in a takeaway joint in Deer Park, near his school. He used to see her almost every day.'
'Was she his girlfriend?'
'No. They were just friends. She didn't have a boyfriend, he reckons.'
'What about the baby?'
'What baby?'
'You remember? I said there was a Baby on Board sign in the back window of the car?'
'I don't think it was her car, Deck. She is...she was...only fifteen, so she wouldn't even have had her licence. Vibeke says that Raelene keeps popping out kids left, right and centre, so maybe she leaves the sign up.'
'Right.'
'Jorel said he sometimes waited for Jody to finish work, then walked her to the station.'
'But he wasn't her boyfriend?'
'No.'
'Oh.' Decca paused, searching for a tactful way out of the conversation. 'Listen, Candy, I've really...'
'Sorry, I won't keep you another minute only...can you talk to Jorel? He's really freaking out.'
'Sure. Of course he would be. But Candy, won't the police want to talk to him?'
'What for? It's not his fault!'
'I know that. But they'd want to speak to him for background, to try and get an idea of why she did it.'
'No way! They'd have him pushing her off the bridge in five minutes to get a result. You know how they work.'
'You've got to stop watching "The Bill", Candy. It's not like that. Besides, it wasn't murder.'
'By the time they'd finish with him it'd be a terrorist plot! No way is my son going to the cops!'
'Okay, okay.' There was no winning this argument.
Candy never lost sight of who wore the white hats in this world. She was thrown out of home at fifteen years of age by parents who refused to make room for her and her 'little bastard'. Reviled and rejected by the baby's father. Busted, one time too many, for shoplifting a bottle of VO5, a box of Maltesers and a Tonka truck from K-Mart, Candy would have gone straight to Fairlea Women's Prison if Decca hadn't fought for her all those years ago. For Candy, the police force would only ever be the 'bad guys'.
'I'll talk to him,' said Decca.
'Great. Thanks Decca, you're a mate. We could squeeze him in first thing tomorrow.'
'We?'
'Your first appointment isn't till ten because...oh shit! sorry...I am so holding you up. Sorry. I'll see you there at nine-thirty, 'kay?'
'Okay.'
'And thanks. Have a great time tonight.'
CHAPTER SIX
'More bull's blood anyone?' Dax's voice boomed out across the punchbowl. Definitely not Selma Thurlow's kind of party, thought Decca.
'Judith looks as if she could do with a transfusion,' Boyd said sotto voce. He was seated at a companionable distance from her on a low sofa. They faced a roaring log fire enclosed behind glass, set in a snow-white column in the middle of a vast living area. Some metres away, in the food preparation area, formerly known as a kitchen, two teenage girls were efficiently stacking dishes in the stainless steel dishwasher, wiping down granite benchtops and firing up the espresso machine. Inscrutable looks darted between them, but did not interrupt their work rhythm.
Dax and Flavia's warehouse conversion in the reclaimed industrial wasteland of West Melbourne was what a real estate agent's sale board would describe as The Entertainer. The entire ground floor was given over to the idea of the lavish, sprawling dinner party, with or without accommodating a six-piece jazz combo. It was both spacious yet intimate: one could be completely involved in the main show around the dining table or peel off into any number of niches.
Once the last of their three offspring had flown the nest for good, the Hathaways had cashed in their four-storey East Melbourne terrace and moved across town. They were part of the upper-middle-class diaspora to the inner city that caused rates to soar and complaints about noise to skyrocket. The city fathers scratched their heads and wondered what these neo-urbanites expected to emanate from city streets. The funereal quiet of the outer suburbs? Birdsong?
A petite, fine-boned woman whose cropped white hair was gelled into fashionable disarray, Flavia sported the narrowest of titanium glasses frames and the chunkiest jewellery outside of North Africa.
Flavia Hathaway was a respected photographer of some four decades snapping whose work ran the gamut from commercial, advertising savvy to serious art cred. The latter comprising studies of rocks, leaves, litter, wrought iron, concrete, etc-not people. A retrospective exhibition had been the hit of last year's Melbourne Festival, while the souvenir coffee table book, rrp $98.99, had remained on the bestseller lists for over two months-nationally.
Dax Hathaway's eponymous restaurant, a fixture in the leafier part of South Yarra for over fifteen years, had a business clientele, both show and pro, as long as your arm and as loyal as a Collingwood supporter on Anzac Day. Ranked as one of the top five Melbourne super chefs, it seemed he had the Midas touch in the kitchen. His recent foray into the Southbank precinct with a smaller, more relaxed bistro, the Dax Max, had been one of the success stories of the leaner, 'post-fine-dining' era in Melbourne's eating habits.
Diners flocked to the Dax Max for the views of Melbourne-in the afternoon light, the back of Flinders Street station looked almost, well, European-the novelty of the river taxi, but, above all else, the food. Word was, SBS was interested in a TV cooking show for Dax, with his trademark handlebar moustache, enormous girth and luxuriant age-defying grey locks.
No doubt about it, Dax and Flavia Hathaway were right up there in the pantheon of Melbourne icons, and their dinner parties were the business.
The fire blazed away almost soundlessly in its glass case as Decca gazed across at Judith, the anaemic, birdlike target of Boyd's crack about a transfusion and was forced to agree. But then, perhaps Boyd wasn't as aware as she of what a fraught hot-bed of co-dependence Judith and Lionel's marriage was.
'I haven't seen you at one of these dinners before,' she said.
'Is that like, "Do you come here often?"' Boyd said with a nervous laugh, which was echoed by Decca. 'Not often. But you have seen me here before,' he continued.