Smithy removed his hands from my eyes, rustling around in the gloom until the lights switched on. My jaw dropped. Spaced evenly around the studio’s large back room were huge slabs of white marble in various stages of completion, graceful sculptures writhing free of solid stone. The statues appeared alive in the changing shadow. Big round fans in the walls filtered air, and winch-chains on runners looped from the ceiling.
“This is the dust room. Where I do most of the chiselling.” In a cleared space in the middle of the hall, an expertly wrought, life-sized marlin fought the lure over a churning sea. “My third commission, worth fifty thousand dollars. The judge’s grudge against me being an artist doesn’t seem to have anything to do with money. I’m making more than my trust fund pays and he still hates my career choice. I can’t figure it out.”
He led me through a sealed partition, which cut the cottage in half. We passed through the front room, which held a sitting area and kitchen, and onto an enchanting veranda that spanned its girth. I was too awestruck to speak as he seated me at a tiny square table and two chairs squeezed together, overlooking a curve of beach. A breeze blew the scent of star jasmine through my hair and moistened my skin with a briny mist. We were still in the city and I could hear the faint passage of distant cars, but I felt an infinity away, without a care. Only the whisper of beach scrub and splashing waves disturbed the peace. And my fluttering nerves.
Smith clattered around in the kitchenette, flicking on the stereo and fetching us drinks. We would eat in the glow of lights twining the veranda frame that twinkled like bubbles in pink champagne. Designed for romance, I thought, stifling jealousy over how many other girls he must’ve brought here. It made me feel less special.
He joined me and we sat in silence for a time, absorbed in the view of a passing dinner-boat. We brushed arms at the slightest movement, afloat in a dazzling aquarium made perfect by the glowing orb of a full moon so low, I could pluck it from the deepening sky.
“Smithy, this is amazing,” I blurted. “You are a genius.”
“Aw, shucks. I wouldn’t go that far.” But his face lit up at the compliment.
I couldn’t contain my curiosity any longer. “Are you able to tell me about your mysterious domestic situation? You don’t have to if it’s private.”
“As if I’d ever keep anything from you? You’re the only one I can be myself with, Winnie.”
His sincerity triggered a wave of happiness. I smiled, suddenly shy, and he reached over and pressed my hand. His tender expression clouded.
“Step-mummy Dearest decided to trade down.” My features remained gormless. “She suggested we take our relationship to the next level. I was in favour of the previous level – the one before we’d been introduced.”
He met my stubborn stupidity with a loud sigh and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. “Brianna’s been trying to ambush me for weeks. That’s why I’ve been sleeping in the pool room. I was a bit worried when I went upstairs after you left this morning. I was distracted and forgot to lock the bathroom door when I had my shower. I’ve been so careful lately. She stripped down and hopped in. It wasn’t pretty. People such as Brianna aren’t used to the word ‘no’. Honestly, I didn’t get any unwanted come-ons with all my piercings and dyed hair. Or wanted ones for that matter.” His gaze locked on mine. “Tiffany and her are enough to drive me back to it.”
“Your father’s new wife tried to seduce you. I’m sorry, Smithy. The poor judge. Will you tell him?”
“Adorable Winnie, always defending the underdog. The judge will find out soon enough. Brianna wants it all. His money and power, and a little toy boy on the side to stroke her ego. She’s not much different to just about everyone we know. Greedy. Ruthless. Selfish. A moral vacuum. Hey, I’m pleased your leg’s better.”
My miraculously healed ankle was an issue best skirted. Not a scratch left after I’d returned from my walk around the city: another perplexing episode. He didn’t seem overly surprised by my special healing capacity.
“Thanks. Is that why you’ve changed? You don’t want to be like any of them?”
“I don’t want to be anything at all like Brianna or Tiffany, especially not the judge. That’s one reason. I was becoming a rich-kid cliché. I started to dislike who I was. And then …” he paused. “I can’t explain the other bit right now, but I will, Bear. When the time is right.”
He looked at me with a strange wistfulness. Fantastic! More puzzles. I tried to conceal my discontent and tamp the burning desire to know what on earth he was talking about. I could do nothing about the other desire smouldering inside.
“Oh, man. You’re not a vampire are you?”
“Nothing so common,” he laughed. “Enough about me, we’ve wasted too many years on my crap. Why are you home from school? Not that I’m not ecstatic, but I thought you had another two years there?”
“It’s an enigma. Bea, Fortescue and Mrs Paget are being very secretive. Apparently, Bea wants to continue my education herself. At least I won’t be bored to sleep. They gave me some fib about boarding school being too easy and failing to engage my apparent intellect. My academic progress is blatant evidence against this.”
The rest of the evening flew by, too fast. I was almost tempted to tell Smithy about my recent mental dysfunctions, but didn’t want to deflate the mood. He served my food and attended to my slightest need. The conversation turned to fun topics and we laughed and reminisced about silly things we’d done together. I could not believe how great it was to be with him. How easy. How much I missed having him in my life. Nor could I believe the new electric intensity between us that made me jump at the tiniest tickle of my skin against his.
“This is a great song.” He amped up the volume via remote. Powderfinger’s ‘Think It Over’ put his speakers to the test. “Come on, let’s dance.”
He dragged me, protesting, from my chair. “Have you seen these shoes?”
“Don’t worry. It’s not our feet we’ll be moving.”
He made a show of rearranging my hair so he could run his hand down the groove of my spine to rest at the small of my back, giving new meaning to the word sizzle. He pulled me close and we swayed rhythmically on the spot, while he sang softly in my ear. At the song’s end, he wrapped me tightly in his arms for an overlong minute.
“Nice,” I squeaked. “But turning blue from lack of oxygen.”
“Sorry.” He helped me back to my seat.
We shared a tub of cookies-and-cream ice cream; Smithy fed me from his spoon. “I’d forgotten how much you can eat. Where does someone as delicate as you put all that food? Is Bea starving you or something?”
“That would be a mercy.” He squinted inquiringly. “You’ve never tasted wheatgrass juice. Sort of like blended garden clippings.” With a shock, I realised our guest would be joining me in the culinary wasteland. “My advice is to gorge whenever you eat out.”
“Ahh. That explains it. I was astonished watching you attack the buffet at the judge’s party last night. What an appetite. Makes a nice change from girls who nibble like rabbits.”
“I thought you arrived late! You watched me?” Great. He’d seen me stuffing my face with embarrassing enthusiasm.
He looked only slightly remorseful. “Me and every other male in the room,” he said, scowling. “I guess I should be grateful for Bargeass. He spared me the effort of keeping them off you. Actually, I’d been there for a while. It took me some time to get up the nerve to come over. You know, after the way things were left before you jetted off overseas.” I cleared my throat, blushing at the phantom sensation of his mouth against mine, hard to forget despite the passage of time.
Smithy gazed at my face, chewing his bottom lip. “Just as I finally grew a pair, Brianna practically tackled me. I wasn’t going to turn up at all, but Mrs Paget phoned me out of the blue and told me you’d be there.”
Smithy came to the party especially for me? Mute Mrs Paget used a telephone? The headlines kept coming. Mrs Paget matchmaking! She’d really made up for lost time in exercising those vocal cords. It was a jarring reminder of my illicit presence here.
Surreptitiously checking the glowing face of Smithy’s diver’s watch, I was horrified by the advancing hours. I did not want to go home, especially with his latest revelation rippling warmly through me, but Bea and the others would be frantic with worry. How could I get us out of here swiftly without offending him?
“Er, it’s time we should be getting back.”
“You have a curfew?”
“Something like that.”
“I recognise that cagey expression. What have you done, Bear?”
“Technically,” I grimaced, “I wasn’t supposed to leave the warehouse.”
He swore for a bit. “Brilliant. You’ve dragged me into your sorry rule-breaking. They won’t want me to stay if I lead you astray.”
I chuckled uncomfortably. “You’re a poet as well as an artist?” His lips pressed together in disapproval. I hurried on to prevent the deserved tirade. “They’re off somewhere with Hugo. If we leave now, we’ll probably beat them back and they’ll be none the wiser.”
“You kill me, Winsome. Now we’ll both be in the septic tank. I only just managed to crawl out. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m trying to be responsible.”
“Oh, right. A tad disingenuous from the guy who was the prime reason I spent my early adolescence driving Bea to distraction.”
His features stayed cranky. “I have to ask you something before we go, and it might sound a bit strange. Okay?”
I hadn’t recovered from Mrs Paget’s conniving yet, I didn’t think I could deal with more weirdness. I nodded warily.
“Have you heard the name Billie Kho?”
“No …” I hesitated. Could it be the same Billie I shouted about in my sleep? But I only had Shabby’s word for that anyway – hardly a trusted source. And I refused to have another person, no matter how cherished, dabbling in my private nightmares. “No,” I repeated, more firmly.
Smithy had stopped listening. He peered overhead at the sky. “We have to get out of here,” he said suddenly. “Now.” I looked up in confusion. “Come on.”
He yanked me to my feet. One hand secured my waist, and with no effort spared to clean our mess from dinner or lock up, he practically carried me back through the studio and out the other side. It was a tribute to his strength I didn’t tip over, my feet barely skimming the ground.
“Cripes! What’s wrong?”
He’d gone pale, like someone who’d seen his own death. “You’ll never make it in those shoes. Take them off, Winnie.”
“What? Why? Not until you tell me what this is about.”
He pointed up at the moon. A dense black smudge blocked its shine, many specks flying together in a massive flock. It wheeled and turned, as if seeking something, only to disappear eventually against the darkness of night.
“Flying foxes,” I shrugged.
The throng must have been high; I couldn’t hear the usual chorus of squeals and chatter. Smith knelt and hastily undid the straps of my shoes.
“Trust me. Please, Winsome. They are not flying foxes. And you do not want to be outside when they find what they’re looking for.”
Apparently it had been too much to ask for one superb night, free of the creeps. “Can’t we just stay here?”
I would use his phone to call Bea and smooth things over with maximum grovelling. Tell her we’d been held up by swarming … whatevers. She was bound to believe such an unlikely excuse.
“Glass won’t keep them out. Quick,” he urged, as I stepped out of my footwear. “We have to get back to the warehouse.”
I hardly had time to collect my stilettos, before he towed me across the wooden-planked path at a testing pace. In front, the cliff face loomed, impossibly high, the stairs almost vertical. Smith leaped up the first few steps with amazing ease, but doubt consumed me. Could I scale death-defyingly slim treads at night and in haste? Smithy hurdled ahead, frantically dialling a cab and swearing about poor reception.
It was abnormal. Without paying attention or using his hands for balance, his progress was faultless. Meanwhile, I scrabbled on all fours in the dark. The heels looping my wrist by the straps were a distraction and banged my arms. My fingers chafed on rough rock, making my already short nails jagged, and I painfully stubbed my big toe, which throbbed and added to my mounting discomfort.
Smith glanced over his shoulder, already far ahead. “Oh, Bear. I’m sorry.” He turned to descend but froze on the spot. “Stand still,” he called tensely. “They’re above us.”
I heard the rhythmic beats of many wings overhead. “What’s above us?”
“Shh!”
I paused, stuck to the spot like a gecko, minus the grace. My muscles trembled and burned. He exhaled as the so-called flying foxes moved on, and recommenced his descent with a trickle of grit and pebbles. Several larger chunks of rock broke free, one bouncing onto my forehead and more scratching my shoulders as they plummeted.
“Ow! This is stupid, Smith,” I madly blinked dust from my eyes, getting angrier by the second. “Stay there. You’ll bring the cliff face down on me.”
“It’s completely stable. This track has been here for decades without slippage.”
Several ominous cracks split the air to make a liar of him, followed by a bubbling tumult of sound. Above Smithy, a wall of shale began to slip down the hillside, gaining speed and bringing with it random boulders.
“Winnie,” Smith yelled, scrambling towards me. “Stop imagining things. Calm your mind.”
“Duck,” I squealed, as a huge rock bumped and spun straight for him. Terrified, I flung away my shoes and crawled as fast as possible, with debris pelting down on my head. I squinted up, the slope seemingly steeper by the second, coughing and spluttering. “Help,” I croaked.
I’d lost sight of Smithy in the billowing storm of dust. Scant handholds beneath my fingers liquefied and disappeared. I began the descent on an avalanche of rubble, flailing desperately for anything solid. What began as a stairway with a rickety handrail carved almost perpendicular in the hill became a rumbling mass of shards that fell like stalactites speared from the heavens. All the angst I’d suppressed about this track’s reliability on the way down to dinner burgeoned into frightening reality like an atomic cloud.
“Hold on, Winnie,” I heard Smith shout.
I would have been happy to obey, but there was a disconcerting lack of anything to hold on to and I felt myself shoved away from the hillside on a roiling tide of gravel and begin to fall. Abruptly, a muscled forearm thrust through the pall of grit, joined by the rest of Smithy as he plunged for me, apparently tethered to thin air. Impossibly, he barrelled into me, flipping us both upright. The impact threatened to burst my innards, forcing the breath from my chest. But the sheer absurdity of his acrobatics couldn’t be true. He sprang onto slipping earth with me securely in his arms and launched us in great unimpeded bounds up the slope.
It didn’t matter. I suddenly realised none of it was fact. Vegas hadn’t dived to certain death in a bid to save me. I was in the midst of another vision, probably spasming in the gutter with froth at my mouth, eventually rousing to a red-strobed ambulance, an anxious ring of strangers and cringing mortification at my loss of control in Smithy’s presence.
I relaxed and let the hallucination run its course. It wasn’t real. In it, Smith was a superhuman alien. We finally rocketed over the rim onto the street, skidded to a stop and he cautiously set me down. Given the action occurred in my head, I was not surprised to see he hadn’t raised a sweat or sustained even a tiny scrape. He was convincingly dirty though, his hair dust-logged.
“Ah hell, you’re all banged up and bleeding.” His face screwed up while he examined my injuries with soft hands under the watery corona of a streetlamp. “It’s too hard to get a taxi at this time of night. Can you run, Bear? I know it’s a lot to ask, but those things aren’t likely to give up. We won’t be safe until you’re home.”
“Sure.” I could manage a pretend race from ‘those things’. None of it was real anyway.
