Share touched my arm. I leaned over and shook a naked shoulder poking out of an ancient dinner jacket with its arms torn out.
“Wha? Mumph?”
“Time to go beddy-byes, Animal.”
Share whispered, “I don’t think you should—”
Animal convulsed, and was out of the seat like a scary jack-in-the-box doing its surprise. I looked down into a face that hadn’t seen the sun in about three years, eyes black with something so thick you’d expect the lids to stay gummed up after a single blink, and with more metal stuck through skin than you’d see in a fragged lieutenant in an Iraq tent. Sodium light from a pole high over the alley gleamed revoltingly from a mostly shaven scalp. One hand stuck out in my direction, quick as a flash, while the other beckoned demandingly. I shrugged and pulled out my wallet, placed a crisp new fifty in the outstretched hand. Share snorted, probably wondering if I’d succumbed either to a stand over job or a particularly sleazy invitation to a quickie. The banknote stayed where I put it. Before it could blow away I sighed and deposited another hundred.
“Come to tuck me in, then, daddy?” Animal said in a sulky voice. She gave Share an inscrutable glance.
Feet clattered: crazy Mauricio approached. Animal gave me a big kiss, then turned away and climbed the steps to the back of the shop.
“Hey, sweetheart darling,” Mauricio shouted. “I wish we’d known you were home, you could have eaten with us, Annabelle.”
My daughter had the door open to Vinnie’s cave by then, and was through it, banging it shut. “Not hungry. Come on, I’ll drive you back to your car.”
§
The heavy haulage tow truck arrived. The hapless Mack had been dragged into the street and half the front of the heritage protected mansion had come with it. The roof on the top floor had caved in. I pulled up a safe distance away, and Share was off like a filly. You could have heard the shriek in Flemington.
“Motherfucker!”
Mauricio had caught a cab home to Fitzroy, so he was well out of it. Wearily, I bolted the driving wheel again and followed her past the behemoth. Reversing it out of the front of the house, they’d managed to run the back wheels up the hood of the Audi and through the windscreen.
Share was shaking, white faced, clutching herself with clenched fists. I suppose she was cold, too, without her fur. Autumn in Melbourne is delightful, but even with El Nino and greenhouse it can cool down shockingly fast at night. I thought of lending her my jacket, but that would have involved getting nearer than I planned just at the moment. Gingerly, I held out my cellphone.
“You could call your husband, have him pick you up?”
“He’s in K.L. this week, don’t you listen to anything?”
Oh yeah, that had been somewhere after the second bottle of red.
“Well, a cab. I’ll call you a cab, Share.” I poked around in my jacket pocket, looking from her crushed car to my dismantled home. “I haven’t even got anywhere to sleep, you should think yourself lucky, Share.”
This time the shriek woke the elephants, or maybe one just happened to trumpet in sympathy. It was unearthly. She came at me with nails extended, and I had to hold her forearms or I’d have looked worse in the morning than Animal. Enraged words were pouring from her mouth. I suspected that her inner harmonies were not all they might be, not at that moment.
“I’ll see you in court, Purdue,” she sobbed, pulling herself free, stumbling away from me. “Every penny you own, and then some. I’ll have you in jail for this, you and your thuggish friend Cimino. You’ll hear from my solicitor on Monday morning. I could have you arrested for carrying weapons and, and felonious intent to scam your insurers. No, keep away from me.”
“Share, I was just going to offer you my jacket. You must be freezing.”
“Stay away.” People were peering from behind curtains. What an entertaining night this must have been for these burghers. “Let me drive you home, Share.”
“You’re drunk, you lunatic. Just piss off.”
I sighed heavily. We looked at each in silence for a while. Finally, I said, “So I suppose a fuck’s completely out of the question?”
It took a couple of moments. I suspected the top of her head was about to blow off, but then, thank god, she started to laugh. She leaned against a lamp post, and I smiled back at her as the makeup ran down her cheeks.
“Oh Jesus,” she said, then. “Okay. Drive me to Balwyn, Purdue, then we’ll see.”
§
And that was it for me. I slept like a bloated pig.
Breakfast at Share’s was basic: black coffee and some sort of rusk. The rusk was only a marginal improvement on the proverbial branding iron, and the coffee did little to soothe the hang-over—I’m a hair-of-the-dog man, myself. I said so to Share, who looked terrible. She seemed unreasonably upset, but then Sharon Lesser was evidently a woman living on the far edge of the edge.
“We drank the dog last night, Purdue. Hair and all.”
The empty vodka bottle abandoned on the kitchen floor seemed
to bear this out. I took a pull of the coffee. It tasted like tin. “Okay, Purdue,” she said from the other side of the kitchen table, visibly pulling herself together, “about the consultation.” “The consultation.” I wanted to lay my head down on the table. “You seem a bit slow,” Share said. “The words are a bit slow coming.”
“My reactions are always a trifle torpid in the morning,” I said. “I’m not a morning person.” My dreams had been black and curdled. I’d half woken needing a piss, convinced I’d heard
Mauricio’s Mack truck slamming through a wall. No, that had been earlier. My house was gone, as planned, but sooner than planned. Oh Christ, the stupid fuck could have killed me. And I didn’t know where Share’s bathroom was, so I’d rolled over and gone again into the murky dark.
“Be that as it may, there’s still the matter of the consultation. I’m your client. I came to see you last night, remember? You know, you were running this feng shui Consulting outfit. You had a really nice office suite in the downstairs part of this really nice heritage listed gaff in really really nice Parkville. Is it all coming back to you? Let’s get on with it, shall we?”
“Now?” I said in dull amazement. “You want a feng shui consultation at this hour in the morning?”
“Stop fart-arsing around, Mr. Purdue. Do your stuff.”
“If you insist, Share.” I squared my shoulders despite the pain. “What needs to be understood about feng shui is that the words mean ‘wind’ and ‘water’. These two primal elements represent the space between heaven and Earth. In this space, which is our dwelling place, the mighty force known as ‘chi’ eddies and swirls with all the wild grace of wind and water. But for all its grace and power, water can grow stagnant, it can become trapped....”
“It can become putrid, can’t it, Purdue? Fouled with pollutants, dead rats, old condoms, plastic bottles, oil slicks, cryptospiridium, e. coli by the bucket load....”
“You seem to have grasped the concept admirably,” I said. The tinny coffee was all gone, and the chi with it, leaving something foul and brackish in the bottom of the cup. I reached for the pot and poured some more, shuddering slightly. “It is the feng shui consultant’s job to identify those malformed spaces where the mighty force of chi is trapped like the stagnant water to which we have alluded....” I trailed off. I was too old for this sort of thing, I decided. This time yesterday I’d thought of myself as a young fellow in the prime of life. Bang. Bang. And the house came tumbling down.
“What about Yin and Yang, Purdue?”