chapter seventy
‘Hello again.’
Tiffany lifted her umbrella to see who had spoken. She was walking through the quadrangle towards the Saint Anastasias shop to buy Dakota’s uniform for next year.
It was Andrew’s wife again. Of course it was. Murphy’s Law would ensure that Tiffany ran into this woman and/or her husband every time she entered the school and at every school event until Dakota finished high school. It wasn’t going to be at all uncomfortable. No! It was going to be freaking great. Cara and Dakota would become best friends. They’d invite them over for a barbeque. ‘Where did you guys meet?’ the nice wife would innocently ask, and her husband would clutch his chest and drop dead of a heart attack (handy!). Except then Oliver would rush over from next door and revive him.
‘Tiffany, right? I’m Lisa,’ said Andrew’s wife. She tilted back her own battered umbrella to reveal her face. There were soft pink pouches under her eyes. One of the metal spokes of her umbrella had broken free of the fabric and was directed at her face like a weapon. ‘You probably don’t remember me. I sat next to you at the Information Morning.’
‘I remember. How are you?’ said Tiffany.
‘Not great. This constant rain is doing my head in,’ said Lisa. She surveyed Tiffany. ‘You look well. Do you take some sort of secret supplement?’
‘Caffeine?’ said Tiffany.
‘Seriously, it’s a pleasure to look at you.’
Tiffany laughed uneasily. Was she about to say, ‘I understand my husband used to pay good money just to look at you’?
‘Are you buying Cara’s school uniform too?’ said Tiffany. She knew that the uniform shop, run by ‘our lovely volunteers’, opened for just forty-five minutes at this time and ‘strictly no longer’ and it was ‘first in, best dressed (literally!)’.
Would it seem odd that she remembered Lisa’s daughter’s name? Suspicious?
‘Actually, I’d already bought her uniform but I’m bringing it back,’ said Lisa. ‘We’re moving to Dubai for the next five years, so Cara won’t be attending Saint Anastasias after all.’
‘Oh, well that’s …’ Tiffany tried to think of a more appropriate way to end the sentence rather than ‘wonderful news’, although paradoxically, irrationally, she found herself feeling almost disappointed. She liked Lisa. It’s a pleasure to look at you. Who actually said that? It was nice.
‘How do you feel about that?’ she said.
‘I’m trying to feel okay about it,’ said Lisa. ‘We did the expat thing when the kids were little and it was all fine, but I just don’t think I have the energy to do it again. We’re very settled in Sydney and this just came out of the blue. It happened on Wednesday, the same day as the Information Morning, actually … My husband hears about some marvellous, incredible opportunity that he can’t pass up or … or some bullshit.’ She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Probably shouldn’t swear on Catholic school grounds.’ She looked up. ‘God won’t like it.’
‘Don’t you have a say in the matter?’ said Tiffany.
Lisa raised a hand in defeat. ‘Some battles can’t be won and this is one of them. I don’t think it rains much in Dubai. So that’s something.’ She suddenly thrust out the bag she held in her hand. ‘Here. Take it. Got the lot there. Our kids looked about the same size. I can’t be bothered going through the rigmarole of getting my money back. Roxanne Silverman runs the uniform shop. She always asks me if I’ve lost weight, which is her passive aggressive way of saying I need to lose weight.’
Tiffany took the bag unwillingly. ‘I’ll pay you.’
‘Nope!’ said Lisa. ‘Take it. I insist. Apparently we can afford to lose all those non-refundable deposits on school fees.’
‘Please,’ said Tiffany. ‘Please let me give you …’ She put the bag at her feet and began trying to get her wallet out of her handbag while still holding her umbrella.
‘I’m off. You take care,’ said Lisa. She turned on her heel and walked away, her umbrella blowing sideways.
‘Well, thank you!’ called out Tiffany.
Lisa raised her umbrella in acknowledgement and kept walking.
Tiffany watched her go. A bell rang and a babble of girlish voices rose from the nearest building like a flock of seagulls. Seagulls with nice private school-girl accents.
She thought about Lisa’s husband.
Lisa’s husband was a polite, softly spoken man. He had been interested in Tiffany’s degree. He’d liked her schoolgirl outfit best: a green and white checked uniform not dissimilar to the one still in its cellophane wrapper in the bag she now held; the one his daughter would have worn if she’d attended this school. Lisa’s husband drank Baileys and milk. A girly drink, she used to tease him about it. Lisa’s husband used to slip a huge wodge of tipping dollars into her garter in one go, instead of making her work for them, or worse, teasing her, as if the tipping dollars were dog biscuits. Fuck that.
Lisa’s husband had taken her out a few times after work. Once he’d come to see her perform in the day and after she finished work they couldn’t find anywhere open for lunch so he’d booked a hotel room just so they could order room service. It had been a revelation to Tiffany: how you could use money to manipulate your world. When things went wrong you just waved your credit card like a magic wand. After lunch he’d gone back to work and she’d had a free hotel in the city for the night. She’d invited some of her uni friends over to stay. None of them believed she hadn’t slept with him, but she hadn’t. They’d just eaten club sandwiches and watched a movie. He had been a friend. She’d been like his hairdresser, except she hadn’t cut his hair, she’d danced for him. Their relationship had felt wholesome.
It was maybe a whole year after that, after she’d given him a private show, that Lisa’s husband had asked Tiffany, in his polite, reticent way, if she’d ever seen that movie, Indecent Proposal? The one with Robert Redford and Demi Moore? The one where Robert Redford paid some obscene amount to sleep with Demi Moore?
Tiffany had seen the movie. She understood the question.
‘One hundred thousand dollars,’ she’d told him, before he’d even asked.
She had pitched it low enough to be a possibility, but high enough so it was still a joke, a dare, a fantasy, and it didn’t make her a hooker.
He hadn’t hesitated. He’d said, ‘Will you take a cheque?’ It was a company cheque, from ‘Something-or-other Holdings’, and it was enough for the deposit on the apartment she’d bought at the auction where she’d met Vid. It had laid the foundation of her financial fortress.
She’d always told Vid that she’d never slept with any of her clients – she was a dancer, not a hooker – and it still felt true. What happened with Andrew was a one-off with a wealthy, older friend. A joke. A dare. A fun idea. She might have done it for the cost of two drinks if she’d met him in a bar and he’d made her laugh. Even after she had slept with him she’d still felt like their relationship had a kind of wholesomeness to it. They had straightforward, missionary-position sex with a condom. She had a dirtier relationship with Vid.
She remembered that afterwards, while they were in bed together, Andrew had begun to talk about a one-bedroom apartment he owned in the city, something about a trust, something about tax advantages. It took her a while to catch on that he was offering her an ‘opportunity’; a mutually beneficial, long-term arrangement. She had politely declined. He’d said to let him know if she ever wanted to reconsider.
About six months later, he came into the club and booked her for a private show. He told her he was moving the family overseas for a year. It wasn’t long after that Tiffany finished her degree, stopped dancing and got her first full-time job.
In all her dealings with Andrew, she’d never thought of his wife. ‘What about the wives?’ Clementine had said in the car that night. ‘The wives stuck at home with the kids.’
Tiffany had answered with a shrug. The faceless middle-aged wives had never been her responsibility. She wished them no ill. She owed them no duty of care. They probably didn’t have great bodies, but they had great credit cards.
Her deal with Andrew was the only secret she’d ever kept from Vid. She wasn’t ashamed, and in all honesty she wasn’t even sure it was necessary, but every time over the years when she’d gone to open her mouth and share her story her instincts had screamed: Shut the hell up. Even her free-spirited Vid had his boundaries, and she didn’t want to find out what they were by crossing them.
So, no, she’d never felt shame about what had happened with Andrew, except for right now, as she stood in the rain holding an environmentally friendly bag heavy with free expensive school uniforms, watching his tired, disappointed, chunky-around-the-middle wife head back through the rain to her black four-wheel drive Porsche, because maybe the timing of this unexpected move to Dubai was a wonderful coincidence, but then again, maybe it wasn’t.