She lifted her
head and looked around the empty gallery. The stark white room filled with
Tyson Heller’s bright sculptures looked sleek and professional, but Charlotte
found no comfort in it. This little refuge she’d built for herself and her
sister suddenly seemed foreign. Where was Charlotte Evans in here? The desk
beneath her elbows, salvaged, lovingly restored and shipped up from Melbourne
on the back of a removalist’s truck, was the only piece of her in the room.
She needed to get
out.
She pulled out her
phone and tapped Emily’s number. The rest of her life started with an apology.
Across
the street from the Evans Gallery, concealed by the low-hanging awning of the
shopfront behind him, Craig watched the celebration. The tables at the café and
restaurant on either side of the gallery were full, as was the gallery itself. People
were spilling out onto the footpath. The air was charged with triumph; there
was much back slapping, champagne popping, beer swigging and raucous laughing.
Inside Bean
Drinkin’, Ben was aggressively working the espresso machine, his face shadowed
by a scowl. His wilting posture and forced smiles suggested the sense of victory
was not pervading the victorious.
The Vietnamese
couple on the other side of the gallery were enjoying it. Food and drink were
flowing, and their boisterous diners toasted them cheerfully as the beaming
restaurateurs moved from table to table.
Craig hadn’t
expected a street party. He’d come hoping to steal Charlotte away, and the
celebration was a hindrance. Still, he’d spent the day setting everything up
for this evening, and he wasn’t prepared to be foiled.
He focused his
attention on the gallery and searched through the guests. He eventually located
her inside, just by the door to the back room, talking to Gareth Moorehouse. In
her pale yellow 1950s shirtdress, she looked beautiful, and she looked like
home. Her hair was pulled up loosely. If things went according to plan, he
would be releasing those locks later that night and watching them fall upon her
shoulders. Or his pillow.
But he faltered,
and his confidence took a hit as he studied her face. From where he stood he
could see her shoulders were back and her smile was not forced like Ben’s, but
there was no joy in it. He'd seen those eyes lit up with delight, but this
evening, that particular spark was notably absent. Why?
On occasion, she
cast furtive glances around the room, as though she was looking for someone. It
was ever so discrete, as though she was afraid of being obvious and of being
caught.
Could it be…?
Encouraged, Craig
decided there was no time like the present.
He crossed the
road and began weaving his way through the crowd towards her, a whisper soon
following in his wake. There were many strange faces, but there were plenty of
familiar ones, ones who’d shouted him down at the community meeting months ago,
and members of the Boundary Street Preservation Group. The whispering crowd
knew who he was and were wondering why he was here.
Tuning in to the
murmur following him, Charlotte looked his way. She watched as he drew to a
stop in front of her. Her expression was fixed, but he saw her eyes change. They
softened.
As much as he’d rehearsed
this moment in his head, he was suddenly lost for words.
‘Hi,’ was all he
could manage.
‘Hello,’ Charlotte
replied, drawing it out, suspicious. Beside her, Gareth adopted a shrewd smirk.
She took a sip of her wine. A droplet clung to her top lip as she lowered her
glass. It was distracting, he couldn’t think. When her tongue darted out to
wipe it away, he thought he might break out in a sweat.
This was
ridiculous. He was behaving like a teenager. Time to get his shit together.
‘Can I talk to
you?’
She looked him up
and down, assessing whether she should give him the time of day. Eventually,
she excused herself from the grinning Gareth and led him into the privacy of
the back room, which was cordoned off from the rest of the party.
She folded her arms
across her chest and waited for him to start talking.
‘Are you angry
with me?’ he asked, nodding at her folded arms.
‘Not exactly.' She
didn’t look angry. More uncertain, but patient. She was waiting for his
explanation.
‘That’s a good
start,’ he conceded and smiled happily. ‘I gather you got the news about the
development not going ahead.’
‘I did.’ She
gestured towards the party with one hand. ‘Obviously.' The loose hand returned
to the fold. ‘What happened?’
‘It’s a long
story.’
‘I have time.'
She dropped her
arms, dropped her defences, and gripped the sink behind her, instantly
reminding him of another time she was pressed up against a kitchen bench.
‘It might take
hours,’ he teased.
‘I’ve got hours.’
‘What about your
party?’
‘It’s not just my
party. It will go on regardless of what I am doing.’
‘Does that mean
you’d be willing to leave it?’
She tilted her
head, curious. ‘Where would I go?’
‘With me.’
‘Where?’
‘It’s a surprise,’
he replied, a mischievous smile dancing across his face.
The smile was
contagious. She returned it, slowly and cautiously. It buoyed him. He was
making ground. In fact, it was hard not to feel triumphant when she was willing
to consider leaving her own victory party for him.
She pushed herself
away from the sink. ‘Hours, huh? You better give me a minute then. I need to
ask Gareth to close up for me.’
‘I’ll meet you
outside,’ he beamed.
Their departure
didn’t go unnoticed. Half of the party watched him hold open the passenger door
of his BMW as she slid in. Closing the door behind her, he didn’t care who saw
his jubilation.
As he pulled out
in to the traffic, she said, ‘Your nana told me to give you time and wait for
you to contact me. Is this what I've been waiting for?’
‘This and more,’
said Craig. His eyes were on the road, but he could feel her watching him.
She huffed. ‘I
know where you get that from now.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Your dreadful
habit of being cryptic.’
‘My nana,’ he
stated.
‘Did you send her
to talk to me?’
‘No, that was her
idea. She insisted.'
‘It would have been
nice to speak to you, Craig. Especially after you hung up on me and then
ignored my calls.’
‘I didn’t hang up
on you,’ Craig sighed. ‘Cassie dropped my phone in the toilet and killed it.’
Charlotte did a
double take but quickly regained focus. ‘You never answered my question.’
‘Which one?’
‘About the
development proposal. I asked you if it was all above board.’
Craig drew the car
to a stop at a red light. He looked across at Charlotte, looked into her grey
eyes.
‘It wasn’t. But
that doesn’t matter any more because it’s not going ahead.'
‘Why not? What
happened?’
Craig grinned at
her like a school boy. ‘Like I said, it’s a long story.’
Charlotte groaned
and rolled her eyes at him, making his smile broaden.
‘You seem to be
enjoying yourself immensely. I hope you appreciate how tortured my last two
days have been,’ she said.
Graciously, he
dropped the grin. ‘I do, and I’m sorry to put you through that. I’m hoping to
make up for it tonight.’
She eyed him
suspiciously, then shifted her gaze out of the windscreen.
‘The light’s
green,’ she said. Craig turned his attention back to the road. She didn’t say
anything more until he pulled up outside his apartment building.
‘Why am I here,
Craig?’ she asked, looking out of the window at his building.
‘I have a story to
tell you,’ he said, and climbed out of the car while she dropped her head back
against the headrest heavily. He opened her door and reached for her hand. ‘Come
with me, I want to show you something.’
She looked at his
hand for only a second before she gave him hers. He pulled her out of the car
and did not let her go.
As predicted, she
moved towards his building. With a step just shy of a skip, he redirected her
across the road and up the dark steps of the Art Deco building opposite. He
felt a slight hesitation, followed by a tightening of her grip on his hand.
Once inside, his
phone lit their way to the bottom of the stairs. She hesitated again, the pull
stronger this time. He expected it. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘The broken step is
fixed, and I’ve been up and down these a hundred times today. The rest are
sturdy. Trust me.’
She sighed loudly.
‘Okay, lead on.’
At the top he
asked her to wait on the threshold of the first apartment to the right. Everything
was in its place ready to go. When he opened the French doors leading onto the
small balcony, the white cotton curtains danced in the breeze like ghosts. He
found the candles lined up on the kitchen bench and lit them, checking to make
sure they wouldn’t be extinguished by the wind. Pulling one of the old jazz
records from its sleeve, he desperately prayed his newfound friend and
neighbour, from whom he was borrowing electricity, had remembered to leave the
extension lead running into his laundry plugged in, and turned on. Thankfully,
the scratchy sounds of the old vinyl soon filled the room.
Craig looked up to
find Charlotte peering in, drawn by the candlelight, the music and her
curiosity. Her eyes widened as she took in the whole room. Gratified, Craig
watched her take stock of everything. The apartment was dusted and gleaming, as
much as it could without a new coat of paint. The crumbling furniture had been
removed and replaced by restored pieces from the appropriate era. The curtains
were new, and the windows they adorned were clean. She walked towards him,
reaching unconsciously for him as she took in the carefully laid table with its
white tablecloth and setting for two.
Her hand came to
rest on his bicep and it flexed instinctively. Staring out the French doors
towards the city skyline in the distance, she said, ‘Craig, this is amazing. Did
you do all this?’
‘I had some help,’
he admitted. For all her faults, there was a reason Cassie was still his friend.
She could still be relied upon when he needed her, and after the severe
berating he’d given her after Emily’s exhibition, she readily acknowledged she
owed her penance.
Together, they'd
spent the day hauling old, irreparable furniture down the patched up stairs,
into a hired ute, and throwing it into a refuse pit where it shattered into a
hundred satisfying pieces. Then, Cassie accompanied him as he raced from
antique store to vintage warehouse, collecting replacements and loading them
onto the back of the ute. Back at the old building she hauled them up the
stairs with him, grunting a bit from the exertion, but not grumbling about the
task.
On the second
floor, Nana Gwen, beaming like a 1950s housewife, had polished the apartment
within an inch of its life.
When Craig had
left to find Charlotte earlier that evening, Nana Gwen was cooking Chicken Tikka
Masala in his apartment across the street, and the end result was now sitting
in a crockpot next to his rice cooker on the freshly scrubbed kitchen bench
top.
‘It’s beautiful,’
Charlotte breathed, tightening her grip on his arm.
Reluctantly, Craig
peeled her fingers away. She flushed as she looked down and wrapped her hand in
the folds of her dress. Craig retrieved a bottle of Gewurztraminer from the
countertop and filled the glasses on the table.
‘Have you eaten?’
he asked as she untangled her hand and reached for her glass.
‘Only hors
d’oeuvres,’ she said, taking more of a gulp than a sip.
As he served the
meal, she blurted, ‘I don’t think I can wait any longer. What’s happened? Why
aren’t you going ahead? What did you do? Will you tell me now?’
Craig smiled. She'd
been incredibly patient. Not many women would have been willing to remain in
the dark while he tinkered around the brittle edges of their life. But
Charlotte Evans wasn’t a doormat, so there had to be a reason she was willing
to blindly cooperate.
He owed her an
explanation. Now. Still, when she was confused she was delectable, and he
couldn’t help but tease her a little more.
‘Too many
questions at once,’ he claimed.
‘Then pick one,
any one, and give me an answer.’
‘Perhaps I should just
start at the beginning then.’
He took a sip of
wine.
‘Dad gave me my
first job at Morgan Carmichael when I was sixteen, over the school holidays,’
he began. ‘Mostly, I photocopied plans and fetched coffee, but Dad always made
a point of taking me on site visits, to see how things were progressing and
give me some insight into the way the worksites operated. It was invaluable
experience, this line of work is as much about managing relationships as it is
about project management.’
Charlotte eyed him.
He wasn’t giving her the answers she craved, but as he watched her, he could
see her mind ticking over, deciphering his meaning. Eventually she said, ‘So it
was your dad who taught you how to get what you want from people.’
‘Some,’ Craig
replied. ‘But remember, my mum was in marketing. She was good at it.’
Charlotte nodded.