had never quite been able to identify the colour that framed him, but as she looked into the dark street outside the store window tonight it came to her at last. It was as bland as moth and as impenetrable as mud.
Annie made another call to Nina in the middle of the week. Nina knew it was a Wednesday because Anton and Marko had footy training and she had parked the Odyssey across from the oval to wait for them. She was supposed to be taking the dog for a walk, but instead Metro, the family mutt, was nosing his way through the bushes while Nina was plopped on a bench finishing her Marian Keyes novel and polishing off a packet of salted beer nuts. She checked the carbohydrate content on the back of the packet—3.5 per 100 grams. That was good. She was doing the high-protein, low-carb diet this week in preparation for getting into a bathing suit.
A couple of the school mums reckoned they’d lost three kilograms in five days! Nina had lost a kilo since Sunday. She was constipated and had bad breath, but it was a small price to pay. Only thing was, she was exhausted. She hadn’t slept well last night. In her dreams she was driving a baker’s van full of loaves and muffins. At 3 am she found herself standing in front of the bread bin in the kitchen, thinking of having just one half of a small dinner roll. She had put it back and walked purposefully upstairs. For the rest of the night—with Brad’s long legs intruding into her half of the bed—she dreamed she was tangled in spaghetti carbonara.
‘I’ve decided that I’ll come.’ It was a female voice.
‘Really?’ Nina held out her mobile phone and stared at it. As if she had picked up Jordy’s phone by mistake and his girlfriend Olivia was telling him she was coming over for an afternoon assignation in his bedroom.
‘Is that you, Annie? Are you saying you’ll come to Byron?’
‘Yep.’
‘Really, truly?’
‘That’s what I said,’ Annie replied evenly. It was disconcerting the way Nina swung between being a nagging mum and a wheedling little girl.
‘But what about work? You always seem so—’
‘Look, do you want me to come or not?’
‘Yes, yes I do. That’s brilliant, really brilliant!’ Nina jumped to her feet and beer nuts spilled onto the gravel path. ‘Oh, Annie, that’s great, it really is.’
‘But I’m telling you, if it all goes wrong . . .’
‘I know. It will be all my fault.’ As if, for the past fifteen years Nina had spent as a wife and mother, it had ever been anyone else’s.
Annie wasn’t exactly sure why she’d agreed to go to Byron in the ugly bus. Maybe it was as simple as why not? She stepped into her compact, shiny kitchen, slid an icy bottle of vodka from the freezer of her side-by-side giant refrigerator/freezer and looked for a clean glass. The shelves were bare. In the sink, slimy cold worms of noodles curled around plastic forks floating on the dull surface of the water. Somewhere under there were glasses.
She swigged from the bottle, lit a cigarette and picked her way through piles of clothes on the floor, back to the bedroom and her empty suitcase. She glanced at her BlackBerry lying dormant on the bed. The demanding little device was dead to the world. And with it switched off, Annie reflected, so was she. If she were to expire right this minute, how long would it be until anyone in her block of flats noticed she was missing? The only clue to her demise would be a letterbox stuffed with Freedom Furniture and Liquorland catalogues. Without the phone’s insistent, pitiful cry, there was nothing in particular holding her here.
Annie thought of Meredith’s offer of a discount on the price of her designer homewares. Where was home? A pair of standard lamps stood, still swathed in bubble-wrap, on her lounge room floor and she could scarcely recall what colour they were. Brown probably. To match the ultra suede three-seater couch that no-one had sat on in six months. To complement the glass-topped dining table at which no-one had ever eaten a meal.
Perhaps the tipping point had come with the invitation to the five-day conference at Jupiter’s Casino on the Gold Coast. The thought of spending almost a week in the company of a couple of hundred other real estate agents from around the country had made Annie’s eyes glaze over. She