How to be perfect, p.19
How to Be Perfect, page 19
Frances looked at the melting ice cube in her glass—a puddle of vodka being watered down. She took a sip. Looking around, she saw the Bondi bride and her friends were far beyond their first sip of booze. They were leaning over the bar, talking and laughing with the young Swedish backpacker serving the drinks. The other staff—all handsome young men—had joined them. The place was getting louder, the laughter competing with the music.
Why couldn’t Frances feel like that anymore? And what were all these happy, skinny, party-animal bitches doing at the peaceful retreat she’d coveted for so long?
She took another glug of her drink, and its impact felt almost immediate. After the burning sensation in her throat, a warmth spread through her chest. Pull yourself together, Frankie. You can have a couple of drinks and talk to some strangers—this is your holiday from life, remember?
Looking around for someone to approach for a chat, she saw the young girl from dinner in the corner. Matt was talking to her, and the way their heads were tilted together it looked like an intense, serious conversation. Maybe he was hassling her? Just as Frances went over to see, the girl threw her head back to laugh, and something about her eyes as she did that told Frances she’d been drinking. Surely she was way too young to be drinking with that guy?
‘Dance with me!’ It was the dark-haired woman from the buffet. She was grabbing Frances by the waist from behind, pulling her to the tiny dancefloor as old-school Madonna pumped out of the speakers. ‘We don’t like seeing you on your own. You can dance with me!’
Frances noticed, with a touch of alarm, that the bride was up on what looked like a podium, pumping her arms madly.
‘Pretox! Pretox! Pretox!’ the women were chanting, and the young men were laughing, and someone was handing out shots.
And Frances took one and threw it down. Jesus. That had been a long time.
Her next clear snapshot of the night was of the dark-haired woman—Frances thought she was probably called Jess. Or Jesh? That’s what it sounded like over the music. Jesh was a fucking excellent dancer, and Frances was remembering how much she’d loved to dance too. Wow. Another thing that had been gone too long.
‘You’re a mum, aren’t you?’ Jesh yelled at her, eyes wide and wild. ‘I can tell. Mums are always the fucking craziest when you’re out.’ And she nodded towards the bride friend who was still manning the podium, her floaty white dress undone to the waist, expensive lacy bra showing as she twisted, a young male Oompa Loompa precariously dancing alongside her.
Frances didn’t think she was that crazy, but Jesh’s comment made her self-conscious about her dancing.
She looked around the room and saw that Matt was standing by the door, water bottle in hand, watching everyone. She looked for the young girl but couldn’t see her anywhere.
‘Loo!’ she yelled at Jesh. ‘Going to the loo!’
‘It’s outside!’ Jesh yelled back, grinning madly.
It was so hot in there now, and Frances was pushing through the bodies in the tiny space towards the door. ‘You okay?’ Matt asked when she got there.
‘Yes, just need some air.’ She was hot, sweating, a little bit dizzy.
‘You’re the one with the husband who works for Bont, right?’ Matt shouted over the noise, as she reached for the doorhandle.
Oh. He knew who she was. Frances smiled broadly, pushed a sweaty strand of hair off her forehead. ‘Yes!’ she yelled. ‘I’m France … Frankie.’
‘Hi, Frankie. Hey,’ Matt turned his back to the room and pulled her in, so there was only him and her in the space before the door, ‘since you’re a friend of the family, you can have one of these on the house. These girls have spent plenty.’ Matt turned his palm up to show Frances a little plastic bag, like the ones she froze Denny’s baby mush in when she ran out of containers. In the plastic bag were capsules, like paracetamols, but with a browny-grey powder inside. She knew they weren’t paracetamols.
Jesus.
‘No thanks, Matt,’ Frances said. She knew enough about being around these kinds of guys—some of Troy’s dickhead workmates—not to betray any shock. She banged him on the arm with her fist as if they were mates. ‘I really am here for the detox.’
He looked at her, shrugged, put the baggie back in his pocket and turned back towards the room, the dancing, the noise, the heat.
Frances put her hand on the doorhandle again, ready to push into the cool air outside. Then she paused. ‘Where’s the kid?’ she yelled.
‘What kid?’ Matt glanced down at her, a moment of irritation on his face.
‘The young girl you were talking to?’
‘Oh, Arden.’ He shrugged again. ‘Don’t know. Probably went to the dunny.’
Frances pushed through to the outside.
She took three steps and it was incredible, the noise had disappeared almost entirely. She was outside, in the dark, in the country. Just cicadas and the odd frog croaking. The air was gorgeous. Her head was clearing. No more drinks.
This was really not what she’d been expecting from her first night at a health retreat.
Frances looked around for a sign to the toilets, and then remembered they were fifty metres away, in the village hall building. A rough path led down to it. She looked up as she walked and saw, for the first time, the big veranda-wrapped farmhouse perched on top of the hill, lights blazing. It was beautiful, even from here.
Elle’s in there, Frances thought, and she wondered if the boss knew about the carnage going on down here in the bar. Surely not—it wasn’t very ‘Elle-ness’. I should dob that Matt guy in to Ben Bont, Frances was thinking as she followed the path down to the hall, only a tiny bit unsteady on her feet. I bet he wouldn’t want Gurva’s reputation damaged by a dodgy employee.
As she got closer to the building, the sensor light on top of the hall flicked on. Something was blocking the path just a few steps up ahead. Another few steps forwards, and there was no doubt it wasn’t a ‘something’—it was a ‘someone’.
Nurse mode, nurse mode, Frances told herself. ‘Help!’ she yelled as loudly as she could into the quiet country night as she ran towards the body. ‘Help!’
As soon as she crouched down to reach for the pulse of the person on the path, it was obvious who it was. She was tiny, with a mess of dyed black hair, shorty denim overalls and clumpy black boots.
It was the teenager. It was Arden.
CHAPTER 25
ZOE
‘They’re not going to open their wallet for ten thousand followers, friend, no matter how good your bum is.’
‘We can put the kitchen brief out to a hundred mums, but you know there are only two who are really going to deliver. Most of their houses are much too relatable.’
‘Does the client want “healthy skinny” or “people are worried about you” skinny?’
Zoe was getting used to the way people talked at her new job, but today she was finding it hard to concentrate.
She was meant to be finishing a roll-out plan for a campaign to sell dry shampoo for dogs, via the country’s fifteen top animal influencers—many of whom made more money than their human owners did in their day jobs—but she kept being distracted by The Horrib-ELLE Truth Facebook page, which was pinging every few minutes with a new entry. It was a busy day in Elle Campbell-hating land.
So Elle Idiot is going to be featured on Fifty Minutes on Sunday night? Did she learn nothing the last time she lied her arse off on national TV?
Word is that Evil Elle is going to be announcing she’s marrying a millionaire playboy. I assume his life insurance has just been renewed.
Surely there should be a law against that f-ing criminal making money on a TV deal? I feel a boycott coming on …
Zoe knew she had to turn these notifications off. My sister’s like a fucking sickness, she thought.
For the first time, with her new life in Sydney, Zoe felt kind of normal. Frequently overwhelmed with anxiety that she wasn’t cool enough to be working where she worked, living where she lived, drinking where she drank, but normal. The more time she spent with the seemingly cool kids she’d met in Sydney, she discovered that mostly they felt that way too, even if they were born here.
Really, Zoe couldn’t fathom being from a place like Sydney. What must that feel like, how different must your personality be, if you were born in the middle of everything, rather than constantly suspecting you were missing out, that you were in the wrong place? But then, what did these people know about how it felt to grow up where she had, how she had, with neither money nor a mother? And basically to have to hope that some loser boyfriend was your ticket out, as Zoe had until she’d found a better way.
A better way thanks to Abi Black. And also, she had to grudgingly admit, thanks to her awful sister. Elle, after all, had been the test case for escape—she’d got out of Thalwyn and away from Dad and their brothers as soon as she was physically able. And Elle had taught Zoe the basics of what was now her full-time job: social media and influence.
I can’t help myself, I’m going to hate-watch that shit. The trailer’s dropping tomorrow and I shouldn’t admit it but—I’m addicted. I’ve almost missed seeing the psycho on my TV.
I’ve lost three family members to cancer and I will NEVER forgive EE (Evil Elle) for lying about the disease. Cancer is not something to fuck about with. #burninhell
I wonder if she’s sticking to her story about her ex-hubby lying to her? Why else would some other poor sucker want to marry that?
Zoe closed the feed on her phone; considered putting it away in a drawer. But that was deviant behaviour in a workplace like hers. This was not somewhere you’d ever be frowned upon for being on your phone—being on your phone was your job.
Double-tap, Like, Share.
After she’d spent more than six months working on The Green Diva with Abi in Daylesford, when Zoe had packed her duffle bag for Sydney and a proper role in an actual office, Abi had been indignant. ‘What the fuck is Influencer Marketing? What does an Influencer Marketing Agency actually do?’ Abi sounded exactly like a petulant child who didn’t want her friend to go and play with the kids next door.
‘They match up influencers—like you, Abi, but probably a bit less … controversial—with companies who want them to promote stuff.’
‘Ugh. Don’t call me an … influencer,’ said Abi, with an exaggerated shudder. ‘Also, we do that all the time.’ Since the awards and the rebrand of The GD, thanks in large part to Zoe, brands that wanted to reach a certain ‘ethically concerned mother’ demographic had been doing plenty of deals with Abi.
Abi was a business now, strange as that seemed.
She was also still completely crazy. Over ramen the other night, she’d ranted and raved about trying to get Adrian out of her shed, trying to get Arden off YouTube, trying to get Grace to agree to a TV deal for the wedding, and all the while Zoe had sat there slurping her free noodles and knowing that Abi lived for this kind of chaos.
Still, the stuff with Arden was really fucking weird. As Zoe had told Abi on the phone last night, it seemed like Elle and Arden had more planned together than that first naked fake tan clip. On her site, Elle was talking about a partnership with a very exciting and risqué protégé of hers who was going to help bring The Goddess Project to a new market.
And now Zoe knew Abi hadn’t talked Arden out of going to Byron. She knew—because tomorrow, Zoe and Abi were going up there after her.
Into the fucking lioness’s den.
As much as Zoe loathed what her sister had done to her family, she couldn’t help feeling guilt for a lot of the shit that had come after. She, after all, had convinced her father and brother to travel to Sydney to expose Elle in the most public way possible. And now, with the prospect of driving back into her orbit, Zoe felt genuinely nauseated, her stomach awash with an acidic mixture of guilt, fear and a pang of pleasure.
The pleasure at how it had felt to show her sister: Don’t you dismiss me, us. Don’t you treat us like we don’t fucking matter. And guilt because, really, what had this achieved? Their dad was dead, two out of three brothers didn’t speak to her, and her sister seemed to be gathering strength up there on bullshit hippie millionaire’s row. And fear because, well, Elle was terrifying.
Yeah, Zoe, that worked out great.
She looked around her office warehouse for a moment, wondering how many of these earnest young people, plugging away at making popularity pay, had these kinds of problems knocking around their brains.
• • •
Eighteen months ago, Zoe had to twist a lot of arms to get her father to agree to come to Sydney and humiliate his eldest daughter.
Bill Wright, in the late stages of cancer and confined to a threadbare couch at his girlfriend’s place on the far fringes of Thalwyn, hadn’t seen Zoe for a couple of weeks when she turned up and asked him to come on a nine-hour drive with her.
Pam, the girlfriend, had tried to throw Zoe out when she heard the plan. ‘Elle has helped this family,’ she’d hissed at Zoe.
They were in the kitchen ‘making tea’, a ritual Pam still observed daily, despite the fact that Bill, sick to his bones, sat in the same spot every day chain-smoking, barely touching the succession of white-bread sandwiches and Iced VoVos Pam brought him.
‘Money was tight around here until she came back,’ Pam told Zoe, whose eye roll was barely concealed.
After a ten-year absence, Elle had arrived in town with a film crew, and she’d chosen to pay off her brothers and Pam to say that Bill was dead, rather than have her father expose her cancer lie by daring to be actually, genuinely sick on national television.
‘Pam, you have got to be joking,’ Zoe said. ‘A few grand is nothing to her. Nothing.’
‘Well, it’s not nothing to us. I would have thought you’d know that. Or have you forgotten where you came from?’
Zoe had to stifle a laugh. At that point, she wasn’t very far from where she’d come from—unlike her mansion-dwelling sister, who was living a life so foreign it could have been on another planet.
‘Pam, I understand you’re embarrassed about taking the money.’ Or you should be, Zoe added silently. ‘But fuck that. Elle went on television and told everyone that Dad is DEAD! The man who brought her up. She’s written him out of her life because it’s inconvenient and because she’s LYING ABOUT HER HUSBAND HAVING CANCER TO MAKE MONEY!’
Zoe couldn’t help but shout the last sentence. Really, she barely knew Pam, the devoted woman nursing Zoe’s dad through his last days. Zoe, like Elle, had left Thalwyn as soon as she was able, and although she hadn’t travelled as far—figuratively or literally—as her sister, she hadn’t come back too often. Too many shitty memories in the town where her mother’s death had screwed up her life too soon after it had begun. Then she’d heard about her dad’s cancer.
And Pam was a good woman. It wasn’t like Dad was a walk in the park, and here was someone who was making him happy in his last weeks and months. Someone who, despite having fuck-all herself, was happy to share it with an old man who had run out of everything, including time. Who was Zoe to judge her for taking some cash to turn a blind eye to a lie?
‘Well, I’m not so sure about that—’ Pam started.
‘Who’s dead around here?’
It was Bill. Zoe hadn’t seen him upright at any time during his visit, but now he was intervening in the kitchen row between his daughter and his missus, holding on to the doorframe, wheezing slightly, but with a sly grin coming around his mouth.
‘I’m not dead yet. Tell me again—what is it you need me to do so bloody much you’re screaming in the kitchen?’
And that’s how Zoe had found herself convincing her dying dad to come to Sydney and pull off the awards show stunt that was still clocking up YouTube views worldwide.
‘Will one of the boys come with us?’ she’d wondered out loud, once she realised he’d said yes and she pictured the endless drive with Bill asleep in the back.
‘Liam might,’ Pam said quietly from the kitchen doorway.
It was Zoe’s turn to be shocked. Liam, the eldest of her four siblings, had been presumed dead or in jail by everyone in the family. As far as Zoe was concerned, no one had heard from him in ten years or more.
Bill had gone back to the lounge, staring at the telly. He took Zoe’s hand as Pam said, ‘Liam’s back. He’s been coming over to visit your dad lately. He’s much better, by all accounts, and he’s another one who’s not too keen on your sister.’
Pam dried her hands on a tea towel as she said this, as if to wipe away the ethical mess this family of Bill’s had dragged her into. ‘God knows what you two have done to be so much bloody better than everyone, but there you go.’
‘Shush, Pam,’ Bill said, still holding on to Zoe’s hand. ‘That’s it, love. Liam will come with us. He’d like to help. He’s been doing a whole lot of apologising lately. When you’re dying, everyone needs to tell you all the shitty things they’ve done.’
As it turned out, it was Liam who ended up not just by Zoe’s side throughout the Elle controversy, but also by her side when, six months ago, they did lose Bill.
At the hospital in Swan Hill, her eldest brother was holding her hand next to the bed when her father opened his eyes for the last time, looking momentarily terrified as he took his last conscious breath. Elle wasn’t there—didn’t even send a message, or flowers, or a flying fucking monkey, thought Zoe. Not that I’m bitter, but come on, Elle, he was your dad. Elle was god-knows-where, and her two other brothers were in the pub down the road. There was just Liam and Zoe. And Pam, of course, with a packet of biscuits in her handbag—just in case Bill had finally fancied one.
It was strange, Zoe thought now, as she looked around at all the bearded boys and androgynous girls who populated her new workplace, how your family could grow and shift.
Now it included a middle-aged lesbian greenie, two little nephews who were being raised in a shed, and an almost silent giant of a big brother.
Her family must be so ashamed of her. I’ll bet they’re wishing the ground would swallow them up.
