Read an extract from Pheasants Nest by Louise Milligan.
2
BAR
It now seems like days ago that Kate first noticed him across the bar. It has really only been a matter of hours, but she’s been unconscious for many of them. It has left her confused and hazy. How many hours? She doesn’t know. Time seems elastic and imprecise. It’s still quite dark, so she figures it’s only four or five am. She isn’t sure what he’s been up to in the interim. Has he stopped anywhere? Has he been caught on CCTV? Will they be able to trace him? She hopes so, but doesn’t know.
He had looked at her across that bar in Northcote in a puppyish way at first. Kate was out with a group of girlfriends— Sylvia, Adie, Brigid and Sophie. He was there with another guy that she was sure he would describe as his ‘wing man’. He was on the cusp of middle age, but obviously placed a lot of pride in his appearance. Not particularly tall but buff in the way that only someone who spends hours in the gym several times a week can be.
A tattoo of a yin and yang sign on one of his biceps. Strawberry blond hair tipped in the style of Australian cricketers. Fitted aqua shirt made of some sort of unspeakable synthetic fibre that strained slightly and deliberately at the buttons, tucked into pale Levi’s that left a bit too little to the imagination.
It occurred to her later that he probably thought the shirt matched his eyes, which were glassy slits the colour of pale seawater. They crinkled in the corners in what was, prima facie, an agreeable way. But upon closer inspection, they fixed on things a little too hard. The laugh was a little too practised— he threw back his head as he did shots with his friend at an angle that was somehow too acute. Slapped his mate twice on the shoulder and winked in a way that he’d seen in a TV show. This is how the agreeable guy acts. You know, Joey, from Friends.
Anyway, Kate didn’t quite clock all of this as he stood at the bar and glanced repeatedly in her direction, throwing the odd good-natured ‘What?’ her way when she found herself frustratingly unable to not look back at him, but she clocked enough to know that this fellow was not, in any sense, her type. So, when it was her round for drinks, she deliberately went to the other end of the bar and turned her back to him.
Kate Delaney was difficult to miss in a room. Tall, with masses of red curly hair that she usually blow-dried into a sixties style. Pale skin, hazel eyes. A peppering of tiny freckles on the bridge of her nose. She liked to wear mini shift dresses in the style of Mary Quant. Tonight’s was navy with a white collar, with black tights to give it an edge. Huge red handbag. Crocodile knee-high boots with blocky heels. She was not to every man’s taste— her teeth were a little gappy, her loose-jointed elbows somehow awkward, her knees scarred with too many childhood scrapes— but those that did find her attractive found her devastating. And when she walked into a room, well, there she was. Unmissable.
And this guy did not plan on missing Kate Delaney on this night. As she ordered the drinks, she felt a tap on her shoulder.
‘Can I buy you one of those?’ he asked, in a voice that she instantly pitied for its nasal high pitch.
‘Nope, I’m fine thanks— just here with them-there ladies,’ she said, grinning in her sweetest way, giving him a playful, let-us-have-our-fun wink.
‘Huh, okay.’ He looked at her, again with that fixed gaze, set jaw. She suspected he was a tooth-grinder. Insecure but pumped up.
She walked back to her friends and downed several more glasses of wine. The room was getting warmer, the girls were getting funnier. Tonight’s topic of conversation: why couldn’t you be the person you were with the guys who really loved you (but who you didn’t love) all the time? Because that was the SuperYou.
What was it about going out on a date with a guy who was nice and smart but just not quite right, but who was clearly smitten, that turned you immediately into the SuperYou, funnier than Tina Fey . . . But as soon as you spent five minutes in the company of a man you were actually into, the one-liners washed out to sea. You became inarticulate as a bloody baboon. It was one of life’s great tragedies. Sylvia mooted that they get together and write a self-help book entitled Unleash the SuperYou, only they all realised, shrieking and choking on their drinks, that they had no bloody, bloody idea how to do it.
At which point Kate and Brigid decided they needed to go to the bathroom. As she got up, Kate felt that familiar warm rush to the head of a couple too many wines. A not altogether unpleasant feeling, but one that signalled she should probably think about calling it a night soon. And yet she knew that she was kidding herself that she would leave. She reapplied red lipstick in the dirty, speckled mirror that was bolted on to the wall and gave herself a shake, bursting out of the toilet door with Brigid to her left. To her right, she heard the nasal voice.
‘Nice arse, sweetheart. I’d like to get a piece of that.’ She felt his hand brush against it in a proprietorial way.
Kate felt the familiar Celtic temper flood her veins. She was five wines down (or was it six?), and she had heard this sort of thing before. Her friends were the types to shrug and walk. Not Kate Delaney.
At times her retorts had had great comic effect. She’d never forget the time when, at a rave party, a sleazy guy, E’ing off his dial, came up to her and asked her in a schmaltzy whisper, ‘If you could have anything in the world, right this minute, what would it be?’ And Kate Delaney had turned to this orange-hued man and said, ‘Anything? Right now? Okay, I’d wish that you would stop going to the solarium.’ She could practically see the MDMA doing a triple pike and turning its effect inside out, right there in his addled brain, right there on the spot.
He had looked like the sort of guy who fancied himself and his prospects with women rather highly, particularly when they were much-younger, naïve-looking girls at dance parties. Collateral damage.
So again, on this particular September Saturday night in Northcote, she decided to resort to comedy. To Unleash The SuperYou. She circled behind him, pointed to his bottom and shook her head, tut-tutting to Brigid, who was pressing her lips together in comically anxious anticipation.
‘Saggy arse, love. So much for all those hours at the gym,’ she said, as Brigid cackled. It was true. His arse was flat. Kate and Brigid then bolted over to the table, grabbed Sylvia and the other girls and their handbags and coats and shot out the door in fits of laughter, adrenaline pumping through them like soda, running down the street like schoolgirls in their mothers’ heels.
Kate felt catapulted back into those teenage nights when you’d pour out half a bottle of Bacardi, fill it with coke and push each other in shopping trolleys while listening to The Clash on a ghetto blaster.
And that was Kate Delaney’s Big Mistake.
-
Kate Delaney is now trying to mentally squeeze Pearl Jam out of her brain. Need to replace song. Choose The Stone Roses.
Although it isn’t really on, it is just in her mind, ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ instantly makes her feel hopeful.
Even decades later, The Stone Roses are cool. She closes her yes and it hurts. ‘I wanna, I wanna, I wanna be adored, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna be adored,’ she chants in her mind.
Outside, the trees are laced with night fog. Infrequent streetlights whiz by. The car smells of the cloying pine-tree air freshener that dangles from his rear-view mirror. Those things always made her car sick when she was a kid. She begged her dad never to buy them again. Whenever she’s in a taxi now and sees one, she’s instantly catapulted back onto windy country roads, rolling around in the back of an unairconditioned Valiant station wagon on a forty-degree day.
Underneath the seat, she can see a bong rolling around on the carpet. Why is it that bong smokers always think they can cover up the smell of dope with artificial air fresheners?
Her bones hurt. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna be adored . . .
In the boot of the car, she hears her phone ringing again. Her boyfriend, Liam. He must be out of his mind with worry.
The tapping on the steering wheel suddenly stops. In the rear-view mirror, she sees The Guy’s eyes dart around a bit. He turns down Pearl Jam.
‘Huh,’ he says, pulling over the car and stopping the engine. The electronic trill of Kate’s ring tone echoes out into the still night. ‘Huh.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’ He veers into the service lane with an alarming screech. She’s thrown forward with the force of the jolt as he comes to a stop. She snaps her eyes shut again and tries not to breathe.
He gets out and slams the door shut and even the tough-guy way he does that is deeply annoying.
The gravel crunches under his shoes. He whistles through his teeth and walks around to the boot.
And Kate Delaney watches through her eyelashes as her phone, still ringing, hurtles like a comet through the freezing night sky and into the bushland below. Thwack.
First thought: Did she back up her contacts?
Second thought: Will she ever need them again?
Third thought: Rookie error, loser. They’ll know her phone came at least this far.
-
In Melbourne, Liam Carroll looks at his phone and wonders what the hell is going on. Where is she?
Pheasants Nest
By Louise Milligan
A gripping, propulsive and brilliantly original debut by award-winning investigative journalist and writer Louise Milligan.
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