Pants on Fire Read online

  God, he was a piece of work.

  But the truly tragic thing about Nick, with all his hang-ups about not inheriting his father’s genius, was that he did have a real talent all of his own. Nick Pollock could flirt for Australia. I think he could seduce a statue.

  But I hate people making assumptions about me, and as we pulled up in front of a block of flats in Bondi, my self-preservation instinct kicked in. It was only a few days since the incident with Billy Ryan, after all, and I wasn’t going to find myself accidentally in bed with a stranger again so soon.

  “Er, Nick. This is not where I live. I live in Elizabeth Bay and I need to go home now.”

  He looked very surprised. “What? Don’t you want to come up and see my poems? I’ve got some of Dad’s manuscripts up there too—you’d really enjoy them.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking. I didn’t care. I just knew I must not go up there with him.

  “Maybe some other time, Nick. I’ve really got to get home to bed. New job, you know.”

  “Sure, sorry, I should have asked you. I just thought we were getting on so well, you might like to continue the conversation on my balcony looking over the Pacific Ocean.”

  “Perhaps you could show me some etchings of it, as well,” I said. Really, it was too much. “But some other time—it’s midnight already and I have to be brilliantly witty and creative in nine hours’ time.”

  He looked at me for a moment—in retrospect, I realise he couldn’t believe what he was hearing—then he drove me home.

  Chapter Six

  When I got to work the next morning Nick had already rung and left a message on my voicemail. Singing.

  “Georgie, Georgie . . . I’ve got Georgie on my mind . . .” He was playing the guitar while he sang it. “Good morning, beautiful. It was great to meet you last night. I’m just ringing to say have a fabulous day. I feel like seeing a movie later—I’ll give you a call and see if you want to come. Ciao.”

  I have to confess I was thrilled. Until the last word. I hate it when people say “ciao.” Unless they’re Italian, of course—then I adore it. But the rest of the message was so lovely I let it pass.

  I thought about calling Antony to ask him what he knew about Nick, but decided not to jinx the whole thing. I didn’t want to hear another Victorian melodrama. I could talk to Debbie about him, of course, because she had seen me leave with him, but at eleven she still wasn’t in the office.

  I was out in the hall at the water cooler when she came in just after midday, carrying two coffees and wearing sunglasses again.

  “Debbie, hi!” I said, thrilled to see her—I could have a mini-post mortem at last. She just shook her head and walked past me. I was dumbfounded.

  “Don’t take offence,” said Seraphima, the office junior, who had witnessed the scene from her position on the front desk. “She’s having a toxic day.”

  “A what?”

  “A toxic day. What you and I might call a hangover. When Debbie has one it’s her toxins coming out from whatever new vitamin, diet, or alternative therapy she has just discovered. It never has anything to do with five bottles of champagne and three packets of cigarettes. In about an hour she’ll be able to speak. Then she’ll go down to the gym, work out, have a sauna and a massage, then a little nap. After that she’ll come up with just enough time to open her post, return a few calls, and read the cards on today’s bouquets of flowers . . .”

  She held up a huge bunch of old-fashioned roses as she said it. “These are from someone called Dominic. ‘To a beautiful lady. Thank you for a night to remember.’ I hope he does remember it, because with a card like that he won’t be getting a repeat.”

  I looked at Seraphima with fresh eyes. She only looked about sixteen—actually I think she was nineteen—but she was a smart kid.

  “Then she’ll start getting ready for tonight’s party,” she continued.

  “Is this a normal week for Debbie?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “When does she find time to do her work?”

  Seraphima said nothing and reassumed her customary innocent expression. “Can I get you a cup of tea, Georgia? It’s milk, no sugar, quite strong, isn’t it?”

  “That would be lovely, Sera, thank you so much.”

  I didn’t get to speak to Debbie until five-thirty. She seemed much better and was smiling again. Her hair looked freshly blow-dried.

  “Great party, Debbie. Thank you so much for taking me. I had a great time.”

  “Oh, good. Did you meet any nice men? When did you leave? One minute you were there and then I didn’t see you again.”

  I looked at her—she really had forgotten about me leaving with Nick. I made a snap decision not to remind her about it, and not to tell her that he’d just rung me and we’d arranged to meet after work for a drink and a movie. I wanted to keep my fledgling romance my own little secret. Big mistake.

  But it certainly didn’t seem that way at the time. We had a great night, with dinner after the movie, then he looked at his watch, said he knew I liked to get my beauty sleep, and took me straight home. And by the time I got up to my flat, there was already a message from him on my machine. He’d called on his mobile while I was in the lift. He really was something.

  It went on like this for a week. On Saturday we went for breakfast at the same café I’d gone to with Billy and Rory, followed by a day on the beach and another movie in the evening. When he put on the tape in his car it started playing Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” one of my favourite songs. Then he dropped me home.

  On Sunday we did the Art Gallery. On Monday he called me at work and I told him I was busy for the next two nights. He sent me flowers. Pale pink roses: “For an English rose . . .” On Wednesday I cancelled our date at the last minute, because we were having a production crisis on the magazine and I had to work late. And on the Thursday night we had dinner at a beautiful restaurant on Balmoral Beach looking out over the water. He held my hand through most of it and in between talking about himself and his father, he laid compliments on me, thick, like fondant icing. Just like the first time we’d had dinner, he drank two double espressos, but this time I went home with him.

  And at five a.m., as the glorious fireball rose over Bondi Beach and he bent me gently over his balcony railing for a tender sunrise rogering (the fourth joining of various kinds since we’d arrived back at his place), I understood why Nick drank extra-strong coffee after dinner. He had no intention of going to sleep. Oh no, he was Mr. Long and Strong and All Night Long. Action Jackson. The Eveready battery man.

  And while he did not have the most amazing body I had ever seen, he was very finely equipped for such endeavours, if I may be so coarse. (Oh, alright then, he had a great big stonker, smooth as a puppy’s belly, hard as a hammer, long as a baby’s arm, straight as an outback road and fat as a VB stubby, OK?)

  I couldn’t stop smiling. Although I should have got the hint when, at one point in the proceedings, he wished me to turn over and directed me to do so with a gracious hand gesture and all the politess of an usher. I couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t a little bit lacking in spontaneity.

  But in between rumpy pumpys he was as tender as ever, spinning me more tales of the imminent visit we would make to his father’s farm, until I began to wish I’d packed my riding boots in my evening bag. He wanted to know everything about me: What were my beliefs about child rearing? Did I think mothers should work before children went to school? He even asked me what I thought about the whooping cough immunisation debate. Holy bloody moly.

  He told me about his favourite beaches and of an ocean swimming pool he’d always wanted to make love in, and how he was going to take me there one moonless night to do it. One moonless night very soon, was my impression.

  I must have been stupid—I was certainly spunk drunk—and he knew exactly what he was doing, even if he was acting more from instinct than intellect. Nick was playing me like my grandfather used to play a trout, while I sat on the
bank in my little wellingtons to watch. Choose the right lure, cast it out into the river and when the fish bites, tease it so gently that it bites down hard on the hook, then a quick flick to fix it, so it hardly knows what’s hit it, and slowly, steadily reel it in. Then you smash it over the head with a blunt object.

  At six a.m. we went to sleep. At nine my automatic internal alarm went off—two hours late. I wriggled about a bit to try to wake him but he wouldn’t stir. I lay there hopefully until the clock said 9:25 and I knew I had to get up and go to work. I washed and moisturised my face with his impressive range of Clarins products (clearly he was a man who liked to look after his skin) and wrote him a note.

  “Nick—Thanks for dinner. It was great. And the dinner. See you soon. (Naked.) Georgia (just in case you wondered who this was from).”

  Well, that was prophetic, wasn’t it?

  By the time I left it was after ten. I was really late and it was still only week four of my new job. I had no choice but to head straight there in yesterday’s clothes, with the intention of buying some clean knickers at lunchtime. I took a calculated gamble that the reaction of my colleagues at Glow would be the same as my old friends back at Kitty in London. Gentle ribbing and a tinge of admiration.

  But when I entered the reception area, Seraphima took one look at me and produced from under the counter one of those nasty toys that emits coarse laughter when squeezed. She squeezed it. Women came running from all directions.

  “Who’s the dirty stopout?” demanded Maxine, emerging from her office and seeming quite thrilled that it was me. Debbie was right behind her, laughing silently but hysterically. Cathy, the art director, popped her head round the art room door to look and Zoe, the fashion editor, came out holding a yoghurt which she was eating by dipping one finger in it and licking it off. Various young assistants and trainees gathered in a clutch by the front desk, giggling nervously. Last out was Liinda, an unlit cigarette clamped between her teeth.

  “Nice work, girlfriend,” she said, without removing it. “Four weeks on the job and you’ve already been out doing some practical.”

  I looked at them all in amazement. I was used to a fair amount of rough teasing from my London workmates, but this was something else.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” said Maxine, smiling broadly.

  “No?” I wondered if I had to pack up my office straightaway.

  “You have to buy morning tea.”

  “What?”

  “Morning tea. A cake. A big cake for all of us. Sera will go and get it, but you’ll have to cough up for it. You have my permission to go down to the gym for a shower and Debbie will show you where we keep the spare undies. And by the way, was he any good?”

  Before I could help it a big grin spread across my face, and my insides (my lower insides) gave one of those involuntary backflips as they remembered just how good he’d been.

  “Hmmm, I can see he was very very good,” said Maxine. “Try and remember some of it for our next sealed sex section. OK, everybody, back to work. Morning tea at eleven-thirty in my office. May I suggest a sticky toffee pudding?”

  There were general murmurs of agreement and I sloped into my office, relieved to no longer be the centre of attention. I was scanning the Herald for Nick’s byline, as I’d been doing (unsuccessfully) every day since I met him, when Liinda appeared. She was wearing one of her characteristic outfits: an enormous pair of denim dungarees over a stripy cropped T-shirt, an arm crowded with multicoloured plastic bangles, pink rubber thongs, purple toenail varnish and, today, an orange gerbera in her nest of hair.

  She still had the unlit cigarette in her mouth, where I now realised it stayed all day apart from the many times she went downstairs to smoke it, standing outside the back entrance with all the other nicotine addicts and replacing it with a fresh unlit one the minute she returned to her desk.

  “So, what sign is he? Get his exact time of birth, did you?” she said as she sat down in the chair opposite me.

  “I don’t know what sign he is. It didn’t come up. Not his date of birth, anyway.”

  “What?” she said, letting the cigarette fall from her mouth and slapping her forehead with her hand. “You didn’t ask him? Are you mad? You did it again? You slept with a man without finding out his star sign? That’s unsafe sex.”

  “Well, we did use a condom. Condomssss, actually. . .”

  “Really?” She replaced the cigarette and leaned back in the chair, looking thoughtful. “Must be Aries, or Scorpio, then. Maybe Venus in Scorpio, they’re horny little devils. I can’t believe you didn’t ask him. What was his name, anyway? Was he really good in bed? And why are you looking at the Herald with such interest all of a sudden? Have they put in a horoscope at last?”

  “No, they haven’t. I’m looking for his byline.” I was so light-headed from my night of passion I didn’t care who knew. I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. “He works on the Herald. His name is Nick and he’s gorgeous beyond belief. He’s the killer shagmeister from Bondi and I’m just seeing if he has anything in here today, to see if he’s as mighty with his pen as he is with his penis.”

  I was still grinning, but Liinda suddenly looked serious and took the cigarette out of her mouth again.

  “Nick, you say? Bondi . . . Sydney Morning Herald. Hmmm. Was his second name Pollock, by any chance?”

  “Yes! How on earth did you guess? Do you know him?”

  “Yes, I know him. And if I can give you a little bit of unsolicited advice, I wouldn’t tell anyone else here the name of the man who made you late for work this morning.”

  “OK, if you say so, but why not?” Liinda was starting to be a bit of a pain. I was so happy, I just wanted to enjoy it.

  “Oh, you know, they might get jealous or something—rich, famous father and all that. And I wouldn’t waste your time looking for his name in the paper. He’s worked there for eighteen months and he’s only had five things printed. He’s famous for it. Spends most of his time checking the spelling of the names of people in Stay in Touch and frequently gets those wrong. Everything else is a work in progress. He only got the job because Daddy pulled strings behind the scenes.”

  Liinda smiled quite evilly, but then looked worried. She put the unlit cigarette back into her mouth. “See you at morning tea.”

  And she got up and walked out. Then the bird’s nest suddenly appeared round the door again. “And by the way. He’s a Pisces.”

  I threw the paper in the bin and spent a few stunned moments staring into space. Why was Liinda being so weird? And why was she being so horrible about Nick? First she was nasty about Jasper, now Nick—was she just plain jealous? But if so, why had she looked so concerned? And why had Nick made out he was like Woodward and Bernstein, but more talented? Oh well, I could ask him all that tonight, or tomorrow, or whenever I next saw him.

  Too restless to get down to work, I went looking for Debbie and the spare undies drawer. She was in her den at the back of the office, a grim windowless room where the sun never shone, but it was like Aladdin’s cave to us because it was always full of fabulous—free—beauty products, which it was our duty to take home and try.

  I’d decided that despite her obsession with only being seen with the Right People at the Right Places and her unbelievable turnover of men, Debbie was not a bad sort. And she was so unbelievably stylish I couldn’t help being fascinated by her.

  I’d had the entire family history from Antony, who was clearly very impressed by it. Debbie’s mother had been a successful model in the 1960s, who lucked out in the new socially permissive age and married a handsome polo player who just happened to come from one of the country’s wealthiest and most established families. As Antony told it, Johnny Brent was as close as it comes to aristocracy in Australia, and once young Jenny Kelly had wrapped her long brown legs around his neck there was no way she was going to let him go, even though she’d been brought up practically on the railway tracks and gone to All the Wrong Schools.
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  It appeared Debbie had inherited the best physical attributes of both parents—she even had nice hands and feet, which seemed to be taking it a bit too far—but you just had to accept it, she was one of nature’s better achievements. She’d been a model for a few minutes but quickly got bored with it and much preferred being a fashion stylist. There were more opportunities to boss people around.

  Debbie had a natural flair for bossing and styling, and as she’d been to school with Maxine (who happily admitted she had been in love with Debbie’s glamorous father from the age of eight), she just glided her way into the job as beauty editor at Glow with the same ease as everything else that came to her in her charmed life. Charmed until that fatal plane crash, at least, when the thing she’d loved the most was taken away.

  She was looking particularly golden this morning, in a tiny white summer shift dress with white varnished finger- and toenails, one simple gold bangle and a pair of orange Gucci slides. She wore something different every single day and always looked amazing. She could get the entire staff wearing silk scarves one month, bootleg pants the next.

  The only person uninfluenced by Debbie’s perfect taste was Liinda, who had her own style entirely. She didn’t give a fig for fashion; she just wore what she liked, which most days was something denim, something junk shop and that outrageous hair. One day she’d wear pink plastic jelly sandals, the next she’d have on white lace 1950s stilettos. She always looked great in her way too, but no one would have been game to imitate her.

  Back in the beauty office, I had the impression Deb-rett’s—I realised I’d picked up Liinda’s nickname for her—was being a bit funny with me. Talking on the phone and not looking me in the eye. She hissed at Kylie to show me where the undies were kept and all but turned her back on me. I couldn’t understand it, she’d been so friendly to me before. I wondered if Liinda had already told her about me and Nick Pollock. Perhaps she was jealous too. After all, she’d taken me to the party and I had scooped up quite a prize. Oh well.