She was idly thinking about how much she’d save here on lunches alone when she bumped into someone. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, deeply embarrassed; what kind of person gets distracted by free food their first day on the job?
‘Don’t worry about it,’ the someone said, a chuckle in his voice. She looked up; the first thing she noticed was that he had tissues sticking out of his collar. What would those be for? Was he sweating a lot? He did have a nice shirt on. Maybe he was protecting it from his sweaty neck?
He saw her noticing and laughed. ‘Sorry, they put the tissues in to stop us from getting make-up on our clothes.’
Now that she looked more closely, she could see he did have a touch of bronzer on his face, and maybe some tinted moisturiser on under that to even out his complexion. But he didn’t have many wrinkles or spots to hide, and his green eyes were already startling enough to draw her attention, and then she realised she was staring because he actually was pretty good-looking, so she turned away and shit, was she blushing now?
‘So um, yeah,’ he was saying, ‘I don’t usually wear make-up, just so you know, but they’re recording some of the to-camera pieces this afternoon and –’
‘You’re one of the contestants?’ Rose said.
‘Yep,’ he said, ‘I’m Dave.’ He held out his hand, but before Rose could take it a young woman wearing a headset – not the one she’d seen before; they must have an army of them here – had appeared out of nowhere and grabbed him by the arm.
‘I’ve found Dave,’ she said into her headset as she towed him away, ‘filming in five.’
As he was dragged off, Dave looked back at Rose and shrugged, giving her a smile before he turned away.
If all the contestants looked like him, Rose thought, then maybe she should have been watching this show. She turned away and promptly walked directly into someone else.
‘Sorry,’ she said, taking a step back.
‘No worries,’ he said. ‘Always happy to bump into an attractive young woman.’
She looked him over. At least this guy didn’t seem to be a contestant. He was maybe in his mid-thirties, wearing jeans, elastic-sided boots and a zip-neck jumper under a quilted vest. He had the same general appearance as the vest: shiny and upholstered, like a private-school sports star made sleek by years of business-class travel and fine dining. His thinning hair looked as if it had grudgingly agreed to stay after he’d promised it he was going to change.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you look like a woman who’s good with her hands.’ He laughed. ‘Sorry, you must get that a lot.’
‘Yep,’ she said. This guy seemed like the kind of man who cruised through life on a wake of his own confidence, which might mean he was important. ‘I’m Rose,’ she said.
‘Leary Barker,’ he said. ‘Executive Producer, Endeavour Productions.’
‘Oh,’ Rose said, holding out her hand. ‘You’re my boss. I’m Rose, I’ve just started on The Dock.’
A look of panic bloomed on Leary’s face. ‘I’m not gonna get Me-Too’ed! Not again!’
Rose looked at him in complete puzzlement. ‘I’m sorry, what?’
Leary laughed nervously, holding his hands in the air as he rapidly backed away. ‘I mean, I’m sure we two will get along fine … you know, seeing as I’m extremely respectful and professional …’ A look of relief came over his face. ‘Yes, that’s what I just said – we two!’
Rose watched him go, not sure whether to laugh or call out. He quickly disappeared around the back of the food truck; she turned and headed back towards her ute.
When Rose arrived home, her father Alan was pottering around the front yard. For a moment she was pleased – it was already two weeks into spring, and maybe today, at last, he was mowing the lawn.
Their rented Victorian cottage was built on clay and shifted with the seasons. Rose was forever planing bits from the tops and bottoms of the doors to make them fit the frames, and the front fence never quite stayed in a straight line. Rose had repositioned the latch on the gate at least five times, repeatedly oiled the keyhole on the worn-out front door lock, and freshened up the flaking paint. The wooden palings on the fence were now mostly just metal and putty, because Rose had needed to nail them back in place so many times.
Now, she admired how neat the house looked from the street in the last golden rays of the late-afternoon sun. But the garden was a disgrace: a tangle of weeds and ivy. Rose’s mother Sarah was always complaining that couriers never bothered walking the few metres to the front door when they delivered her parcels of review books. But why would they bother, Rose wondered. It looked like the bloody Amazon out here.
Her heart sank as she opened the gate and saw her father was doing nothing much, as usual. ‘This is the darkest timeline!’ Alan shouted at his phone. ‘Huge if true!’
She sighed. He’d clearly got into another one of his online arguments, and he’d be useless for the rest of the day. That was the problem with having parents who’d devoted their lives to the arts. They were full of passion, but it rarely connected to anything in the real world.
Gesturing at the bag of takeaway food she was carrying, Rose walked past Alan towards the house. He briefly nodded at her, then turned back to his phone. ‘I can’t even!’ he yelled. ‘This is the conversation we need right now!’
The front door was harder to open than usual. A couple of kicks from Rose’s work boot and it finally yielded. She heard a crash and thud from inside.
‘Sorry darling,’ Sarah called out from the back of the house. ‘I’m writing a cultural history of thin-cut chips, so I had to move that stack of books to get to my copy of Fries of the Planet of the Apes. But then I rediscovered my Winter Reading Stack. I’d totally forgotten about it.’ She sighed. ‘That got so many likes on Instagram. So I figured – why not do a Spring Reading Stack?’ She paused. ‘Then I kind of lost track of time …’
‘That’s okay,’ Rose said, stepping over the volumes scattered on the hallway floor. To get to her bedroom door she had to move more books out of the way, without disturbing the other wobbling stacks lining the walls. Her bedroom curtains were drawn and the room was dark. She dropped her work bag on the polished boards with a satisfying thunk, and heard a strangled cry from the far side of the room.
‘Bloody hell! Renton, what are you doing?’
‘I had to use your computer,’ her brother said. ‘Mine had too much malware.’
‘Maybe if you stopped downloading those foreign art films …’
‘Art films!’ he said in an outraged voice. ‘Hardly – I was downloading the current season of Tramp Academy.’
‘Whatever,’ Rose said. ‘I’ve brought dinner. Get out – and leave my laptop.’
Once Renton had shambled away, Rose flopped down on the bed. After a day spent navigating the landlocked labyrinth of Ocean Springs, she dearly wanted a chance to rest. But the Thai takeaway was already getting cold, and Rose knew that if she hadn’t brought dinner home nobody else here would think about eating until 10 p.m. Her job meant she had to be in bed by nine.
She picked up the bag