I received an invitation from Dave to go to the book launch of one of my crime writers. This author, who went by the pen name Gina Patterson, was launching True Crime: Dancers, a book featuring a random assortment of dancers who had been killed: ballerinas, pole dancers, clubbers, hip hoppers and ballroom dancers, as well as two killers who were dancers, including the little-known male belly dancer in Wales, who used to lure women home from events and then slash their stomachs open. It was actually one of the more enjoyable books I’d worked on. Half the images were of the dancers in their costumes, which were far more pleasant than the usual grizzly crime shots.
In true true-crime geekery, the invitation said that we had to dress as our favourite dancer.
‘Come on, let’s get a babysitter,’ I urged Luke.
‘It’s two of my least favourite things: dressing up and dancing.’
‘I know. But we were talking only the other night about doing more fun things together. I can get Hattie to babysit. It won’t be a problem. Come on, we never do anything just the two of us. We can be adults for the night.’
‘Dress up as my favourite dancer? Who the hell is there?’
‘Fred Astaire.’
‘Everyone will be Fred Astaire. Who else is there?’
‘I don’t know. One of the Russian ballerinas? Michael Jackson?’
‘See, it’s shit already.’
I had to laugh, because it really was kind of a shit idea.
‘What about those two from Dirty Dancing? Or John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in Grease? No, actually, wearing shiny leggings is a crime against humanity. We need a bearded dancer. Do you know any bearded dancers?’
‘I don’t think any man with a beard has ever danced. I know. Let’s do Strictly Ballroom: Paul Mercurio and the curly-haired lady. We can take the piss. Just don’t make me shave the beard.’
‘Fine. I’ll find you a bolero jacket.’
‘Jesus, do we really have to? Can’t we just turn up and pretend we’re something?’
‘Come on, let’s get into the spirit of things. Just a bit.’
Of course, I was hoping that Suzi would be there. The true-crime scene in Melbourne is small and close-knit. Her book was back with the designer, so I didn’t have an excuse to contact her and ask if she was coming. Besides, the last time I had spoken with her, I’d been rather short. She’d asked whether we could replace pages 127 to 143, and I had to put on my teacherly tone, the one I use with authors when they’re being unreasonable, and remind her of the costs of corrections and the schedule and tell her that if she wanted the book out by Christmas then she would have to stop making changes.
***
I found a bolero jacket for Luke in an op shop. It wasn’t the fancy gold of Paul Mercurio’s, and I suspected that it was actually a lady’s jacket, but it was black and he was just able to squeeze his shoulders into it. He wore a white shirt and black pants and some black desert boots. In a different op shop down the street, I found an orange, layered Spanish dress. There was nothing glamorous or Baz Luhrmann about it: I looked frumpy and the colour did nothing for my face. But I’d already wasted half a day searching for costumes, so I had a massive ‘that will do’ moment and bought it. I wore my hair tied back in a ponytail, smoothed down with some of Luke’s hair product. I tried creating a couple of curls around my ears, but they fell limp. I looked like a teenager who refused to wash her hair weekly.
‘Maybe we should just go as ourselves,’ I said, ten minutes before Hattie arrived. ‘I’ll get back in the shower and wash my hair out. Half the people there won’t be dressed up.’
‘Come on, we don’t have time. You look fine.’
‘I look ridiculous. This dress is stupid. I feel like one of those vintage dolls that cover a toilet paper roll. You know, with the crochet skirts?’
‘It’s fine.’
‘No one is even going to know who I am.’
‘Who cares?’
‘You’re right. Who cares.’ I looked ridiculous already, so I went crazy with my makeup; I put thick eyeliner on my eyelids and dotted a black mole above my lip. I put some blush on, something I hadn’t used since 1989. I applied lipstick in such a rich red colour it made my teeth look yellow.
When Hattie arrived she said, ‘What have you done to your face?’
‘I don’t know. I went a bit silly. Does it look terrible?’
She looked me up and down. ‘Who are you?’
‘Fran from Strictly Ballroom.’
‘Oh.’
Just then, Luke came out looking suave, his body shown off in his lady’s bolero jacket and tight pants.
‘Paul Mercurio!’ Hattie sung out, moving forward to give him a tight hug. ‘You look fantastic!’ They kissed European-style on both cheeks.
It had been a while since Hattie and Luke had seen each other, and I suddenly felt like a fraud. Hattie knew all about my extramarital problems and here I was playing happy wife, getting dressed up and going out with my husband. It felt odd and I wished that I’d never said a thing to her, as she was probably feeling awkward, too. But maybe I was reading too much into everything. Maybe I was feeling particularly weird because I’d overdone my face and my dress looked stupid and I didn’t even feel like going to a ridiculous fancy-dress party thrown by a true-crime author anymore. What kind of author launches their book in fancy dress anyway? She was obviously even more insane than me.
‘Let’s go,’ I said, throwing on a coat. ‘Max should go to bed after eight. Just remind him to brush his teeth.’ Then I yelled out, ‘Max, we’re going now — love you.’ Max came out of his bedroom, having separated himself from whatever device it was that he was playing, and gave us a kiss each.
***
The launch was at a bookshop in Brunswick. They’d put quaint pastel bunting along the back wall and fairy lights were hanging from the ceiling. I was pleased that the lighting was dim and my face wouldn’t look so obviously tragic.
Dave came over. He was dressed as Fred Astaire. I reintroduced him to Luke and they exchanged some pleasantries together.
‘Who are you?’ he asked me.
‘Fran from Strictly Ballroom.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘And you’re Paul Mercurio?’
‘Yep.’
‘Hey, Suzi rang me the other day,’ Dave said. ‘She was worried about her book. She said that you were resisting making some changes.’
‘Dave, you know it’s too late . . . We’re at second pages and she wants to add new text. It’s ridiculous — it’ll cause heaps of repagination, and the index is already being drawn up.’
‘Look, I know. But she’s got some pretty compelling reasons . . .’
‘I hope you backed me up.’
‘Well, I’ve pulled it back from the designer.’
‘You did what? How are we supposed to get it out on time? It’s already running late.’ I took a deep breath and reminded myself of my resolve to remain calm about such things. If a publisher wanted to muck around with a book, then it was their problem, not mine. Although I knew the pressure would get thrown back on me to make up the time and get it over the line.
‘Speaking of the devil . . .’
I turned, and there was Suzi dressed as Shirley Temple. She looked really cute. She was wearing a pretty white dress with a bow at the back and red Mary Jane shoes. Her curly hair was tied up in a way that made it look shoulder-length and childlike. She looked perfect and I looked like such a loser. I felt like stamping my feet in frustration.
She had Dave wrapped around her little finger. How could he undermine me like that? We’d always had such a strong professional relationship. Yet, with Suzi, he seemed to not care about any of that. How dare she go behind my back to him after I’d spoken to her? She was a spoilt brat.
‘On the good ship lollipop,’ Luke greeted her, smiling like a fool.
She did a goddamn curtsy, holding out her dress in each hand like a princess. She looked at Luke. ‘There are no new steps!’
Oh, such clever banter, the two of them. Finally, she turned to me. ‘Hello, Fran,’ she said coldly.
‘Shirley.’
I knew Dave could feel the icy nature of our exchange, but Luke was clearly oblivious to it. He was under Suzi’s spell, looking at her adoringly, with his mouth slightly ajar.
‘Good crowd,’ I said to Dave, just to keep some sort of conversation rolling.
‘Yeah, we’ve had a great response to the review copies we’ve sent out. And Gina has a lot of friends. There’re a few bloggers here, and that’s the book reviewer from The Guardian over there. Not bad for a Thursday night.’
‘What’s with the dressing up?’
‘I don’t know. But she was adamant about it. You know how authors are.’ He leaned in and whispered this to me, as though he was on my side against the authors, when really I knew that he was like a slimy real estate agent who was working for both sides and the only person he was looking out for was himself. ‘Just wait. She’s also insisted on some dancing later on.’
‘Fantastic,’ I said, rolling my eyes.
The runner-up from the last season of So You Think You Can Dance launched the book with a passionate, but somewhat misguided, speech about other crimes in dance. She spoke about costume disasters and the catastrophic consequences of getting together with one’s dance partner. Gina Patterson — dressed in an unflattering white tutu, as Anna Pavlova two decades past her prime — read part of her chapter on the belly-dancing killer. She thanked all of the people who had helped her with the book: relatives of the victims, a prisoner, and — especially — God (I hadn’t picked her as the religious type), and made special mention of my attention to detail, support and enthusiasm for the book. It always feels pretty special when an author acknowledges my work, because in the main it’s invisible.
After the speeches, they turned on the music and set the disco ball to rotate. The strangest mix of Gina’s friends and relatives, other true-crime writers, journos and fans of her books took to the dance floor in their makeshift costumes to celebrate a book about dancers who had killed or been killed. It was the weirdest sight. I thought about all of the things that I wanted to write to Jarvis about the night. I was itching to be in front of my computer screen relaying all my impressions: ‘Gina Patterson danced holding two copies of her book to her chest like Gladiator breastplates. And you should have seen this fat Michael Jackson ex-cop trying to do the moonwalk backwards with a pint of Guinness spilling in his hands. He took out Gina. She managed to hold onto those two books of hers even as she slipped over.’
I was sitting on a seat, a true wallflower, content-narrating in my head an email to my lover whom I never saw. It was almost as though I’d forgotten how to think for myself: every thought was constructed as a sentence to Jarvis. ‘And then there’s Dave. We’ve worked together for years, but I didn’t find out until tonight that his wife ran off six years ago to join the roller derby. True story.’
But then I noticed my husband on the dance floor. It was only the second time in my life that I had seen him dancing, but he was truly going for it, swinging Suzi around with such enthusiasm I thought he was almost going to attempt a Patrick Swayze airlift.
And for the first time I felt something that I hated to admit was jealousy. She had got him to dance. I thought of all the rejections over the years, my hand outstretched to him, pleas of ‘come on, it doesn’t matter what you dance like’. Here he was, completely lost in the moment with Suzi, unselfconscious and having fun. She had achieved what I hadn’t been able to do since the very first time I had met him. I felt like throwing myself on the floor and crying.
Instead, I went to the bar and ordered a shot of vodka, from a man who had let his beard creep down his neck in a very unappealing way. I slammed down the shot, then asked for another, and all of a sudden I had the most amazing craving for a cigarette. So I slipped out the front and loitered until a half-normal-looking guy appeared from the pub next door with a packet of cigarettes.
‘Can I bum one?’ I asked. He looked a bit hesitant. He was young, probably a student, probably poor and living on some kind of youth allowance. But he handed me a cigarette eventually and offered me his lighter.
‘My husband is in there falling in love with another woman,’ I said, taking my first drag. Of course, he didn’t know what to say, so I filled in the silence. ‘It’s what I wanted. I set it up. It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for, because I’ve been wanting to get rid of him. But it’s kind of bittersweet, you know?’ I looked at him, appealing for some kind of understanding, but he was only a kid really, probably in his first year at Melbourne Uni, clean-shaven, innocent, full of stupid, youthful hope, his whole life ahead of him. ‘This was my plan, to get my husband to fall in love with another woman. And now it’s working. It’s working! And I picked her. I thought I liked her. I’ve got an eight-year-old son, so I had to choose someone carefully. But she’s a bit of a spoilt brat. A bitch. She’s cunning and pretty. And I’m starting to think that I’m the only mother for my son.’
The poor kid. He must have thought that I was truly insane, because he dropped that precious cigarette of his on the ground, butted it out with his heel and bolted back into the pub, probably to tell all his friends about the loopy lady he’d just met outside. I could feel myself coming unstuck, so I did something that I never did: I called Jarvis.
‘Jarvis? It’s Luisa.’
‘Luisa? Hey there. What’s up?’
‘My plan, it’s working. Luke’s falling in love. They’re inside at the book launch now. Dancing! He never dances. Have I told you he never dances? I can’t remember if I’ve ever told you.’
‘Sweetie, are you okay?’
‘It’s working. We can be together soon. I promise you. You know that I love you?’
‘I love you, too. Madly. Insanely. But are you okay?’
‘I’m okay. It’s great, isn’t it? He’s dancing. He’s fucking dancing. And did I tell you he has a beard now?’
‘Are you okay? You sound strange. Do you need me to come and get you or anything?’
‘Nah, nah, I’m fine. I’m going back inside. I’ll email you. You should see this place. This night is crazy: true crime, dancing, killers, dress-ups, ex-cops, Dave’s wife joined the roller derby. It’s insane.’ All of a sudden, I couldn’t properly articulate any of those things that I’d been narrating in my head to him. It seemed easier to write them, not say them. ‘I’ll email you. I love you.’
‘Love you, too.’ And we hung up.
I stumbled back inside, only to find that Luke hadn’t yet exhausted himself with Suzi. They were still making moves on the dance floor. I was about to extract him when another author I had worked with began a conversation about his next book: Cluedo Killers, subtitled The Candlestick, Dagger, Lead Pipe, Revolver, Rope and Spanner.
His breath was intense, perfumed with the sour smell of stress and too much coffee and an overdose of kabana sticks from the rather ordinary nibbles platters. He’d taken a stand against the dressing up and was wearing a red polo top that had sweat patches at the creases of his man boobs. He was a ratbag to look at, but his manuscripts had been some of the best I’d worked with. They were incredibly well organised, and it was hard to even find a spelling mistake. He always delivered everything on time and I’d never had to chase him up for a thing.
Although I liked working with him, he was an incredible bore in real life. He was obsessed with his subject matter and likely to lure one into the most depressing and shocking tales of murder and mayhem. And that night he wasn’t going to let me out of his sight until he’d told me about the Samoan rope killer whom he’d discovered while researching his latest book. The rope killer, you guessed it, only used ropes to kill women. Like a boa constrictor, he wrapped the women up while they were still alive, and then pulled and pulled on the rope until the air went out of them.
Because I wasn’t being paid to listen to that kind of story right then, I made an overblown excuse about my son and his upper respiratory system, and how the babysitter had just rung. ‘I have to get my husband. He’s dancing, he never dances. We have to go. I just have to go, okay?’ I was perhaps ruder than I meant to be. But the view of Luke and Suzi in my peripheral vision was getting to me. I wasn’t so upset about their flirty looks at each other; it was the fact that he was dancing that bugged me.
I stormed onto the dance floor and grabbed Luke by the hand that wasn’t holding onto Suzi. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’
He hadn’t been looking very hard, obviously.
‘He doesn’t usually dance,’ I shouted above the music to Suzi, wanting to dispel any grandiose images she was concocting in her head. ‘Even at weddings. He never dances at weddings. He’ll sit at the table and drink beer. You’ll have to dance with the uncle of the bride or the single girls.’
She looked at me wide-eyed, as stunned as a Japanese manga character.
‘Let’s go,’ I said. Luke’s feet were planted to the floor. ‘Let’s go,’ I said again. ‘I want to go. I’ll speak to you next week, Suzi. We’ll have to work out a way to get that book of yours back on track before it implodes.’ I grabbed Luke by the wrist and pulled him outside with me.
‘You were so rude,’ he said to me once we were in the car. ‘Are you drunk?’
‘I’m not drunk.’
‘What’s your problem? We were having fun. Like adults. Like you wanted.’
‘Are you kidding me? We weren’t having fun together.’ I was gesticulating wildly with my pointer finger, like I was fanning the wind. ‘It wasn’t you and me. It was you and . . .’ I couldn’t even say her name. ‘You were dancing. I can’t believe it. You were dancing.’
‘What’s the big fucking deal?’
I should have been happy. This was all my idea, another great step in the plan I had to carry out in order to be with the man I had fallen in love with. Yet I really didn’t like that my understudy was performing so much better than me, so quickly.