There would be the interminable presentations on how to succeed (Be yourself. Stand out from the crowd. Do something memorable for your customers!), how to understand Gen Y (They all want to be individuals. You must be an individual too!), and how to sell to international buyers (They’re all looking for a haven from the storm of global realities! Be a Safe Harbour!). There would be the forced jollity of cocktail evenings, fancy dress nights, sports afternoons and formal dinners. There would be an evening when she’d get legless. She would wake next morning to find a double-knit polo shirt and a pair of cargo pants crumpled on the floor of her hotel room and the anonymous, lumpy form of a delegate from Bundaberg snoring in the bed next to her.
It should have been a simple enough task to pack her bag for Byron—a fortnight of shorts, singlets and T-shirts, a good outfit for the wedding. How hard could it be? But Annie was finding it harder and harder to do even the simplest things. Bills were piled, unopened, on the coffee table. Her car was overdue for a service. There was nothing edible in the fridge. The kitchen cupboards were empty. She badly needed her roots done. She hadn’t called home in a fortnight.
Annie couldn’t help feeling that she was the victim of something as banal as ‘bad timing’. Sometimes she recorded episodes of Desperate Housewives, only to find that, on playback, she was coming in somewhere after the last commercial break. Sometimes she met a man she liked, only to find that he had broken up with his wife just three months before. Sometimes she woke up with bright enthusiasm about her future, only to find that she was thirty-nine and almost halfway through her life. Her timing was way off and it seemed the problem was cumulative. The older she got, the more it seemed that she was out of step and treading on her own toes.
She kicked over the pile of laundry on the floor in the vain hope there might be a clean pair of black trousers under there which had escaped her notice. No dice. Turning one pair of expensive Italian wool jersey pants right-side-out, she was appalled to see the pink of her palm through a neat round hole. A cigarette burn, right there on the front near the knee. She vaguely remembered jumping up from her bar stool and brushing away a smouldering fag end . . . When had that happened? Thursday, Friday, Saturday night? She cursed and threw the pants into a pile with the other clothes that needed mending. A broken zip here, a missing button there, a hem down. She’d get around to the pile one day. She would go to a haberdashery and buy a sewing kit.
Stowed under her old single bed back at the homestead on the family farm was a cardboard box—covered with floral wrapping paper, lined with tissue and scattered with mothballs—containing all the items Annie had sewn when she was a girl. Dolls’ clothes, cushions, doilies, table napkins—even little blouses and jackets for herself. Her mother was keeping them in the hope that one day she would have a granddaughter to give them to. But that would probably never happen now. The box might as well be thrown on a bonfire.
Spying a corner of the conference invitation sticking out from the pile of documents on her coffee table, Annie retrieved the glossy card. She slowly and methodically ripped it into tiny pieces and threw the lot into the air. The multicoloured fragments of the next two weeks of her life floated to the floor.
Cradling her bottle of vodka, Annie crawled into a crumpled nest of bedsheets and blankets. She felt something cold and hard pressing against her left thigh; reaching down, her fingers curled around a remote control. All the smart apartments had them now—very modern, convenient and affordable—so that, from the comfort of your bed, you could set the recessed ceiling and wall lights and table lamps in an infinite number of configurations to match your mood.
In an instant the bedroom was pitch black.
Six
‘Did you ever hear that story about a man in America who was driving his brand-new Winnebago on the freeway? He put it on cruise control, got out of the driver’s seat and walked through to the back to make a cup of coffee . . .’ Annie was telling this tale with her