The Housemate Read online

  She hands him the smoothie and drinks some of her own, blanching at the taste like she always does.

  ‘You’ve really nailed this now, babe, it’s perfect.’ He looks at his half-empty glass with wonder.

  ‘Thanks! There’re eggs too if you want some. I need to jump in the shower. I’ve got to get going.’

  Dean looks guilty as she hands him a plate. ‘I was hoping you’d take the girls today. Some of the info we prepped last night has fallen through, and the press conference is at nine.’

  Dean runs a PR firm that represents several high-profile individuals and organisations. He used to work in communications at the premier’s office but now makes a lot more money running his own show.

  ‘I don’t think I can,’ replies Oli, her short but peaceful commute evaporating before her eyes. ‘I’ve got to file a piece by midday, and I might need to jump in and help TJ on the O’Brien coverage.’

  A tiny crease forms between Dean’s brows as he serves himself eggs on toast. ‘Shit.’ He closes his eyes.

  Amy looks delighted. ‘Daddy! You’re not supposed to say that.’

  ‘Surely a pro like TJ will be fine without you?’ The slightest hint of irritation has crept into Dean’s voice, and Oli reminds herself of her promise to make more of an effort with the girls.

  ‘It’s okay, I can do it. I’ve been up for hours and got a lot of my piece done already. And you’re right, TJ will be fine. But I’ll need to drop them early—I can’t miss the editorial meeting or Dawn will kill me.’

  Dean tips his head quizzically but looks relieved. ‘You sure, Ol? I don’t want to muck up your morning.’ He starts eating.

  ‘It’s okay. I just won’t wash my hair. It’s no big deal.’

  ‘Your hair looks perfect.’ His eyes linger on her cleavage. ‘Seriously, you’re a lifesaver. You can take them to before care, so you should still get to the office by eight if you leave in the next thirty.’

  She mentally adds the inconvenient detour to her morning schedule.

  ‘Hang on, you’ve been up for hours?’ He looks at her with concern. ‘You couldn’t sleep again?’

  She glances at Amy, who is now pushing her food around her plate.

  ‘Just insomnia,’ Oli mutters, quelling a flash of resentment. Dean has no trouble sleeping despite the horror that must sometimes try to push into his thoughts. She once hoped they might share it, the clutch trauma can have in the early hours of the morning. But so far there haven’t been any bonding opportunities in the middle of the night. He sleeps like the dead.

  ‘You should take those pills I got you,’ he says.

  She shrugs. ‘Maybe.’

  He shrugs back, then starts eating.

  She loves the way his hair curls at the nape of his neck, almost hiding the cluster of tiny moles behind his left earlobe. For the first time, she notices a few strands are grey.

  ‘You work too hard,’ he says in between mouthfuls, ‘and you know you don’t have to—not anymore. You should think seriously about going freelance. Write that book you used to talk about.’

  She riffles through rubber bands and takeaway menus in the junk drawer, looking for a pen. She senses his eyes on her, but she doesn’t want to have this conversation again. Ever since she moved in three months earlier, he’s been like a dog with a bone about her working less, encouraging her to slow down. And even though writing for pleasure has an appeal, the ease with which he can grant her lifelong wish feels wrong. He’s older than her and earns a lot more money. Plus, the girls’ future is more than taken care of.

  ‘Bingo.’ She locates one of her black felt-tips; they always go missing in this house.

  ‘Are you still going to make that appointment?’ he asks, voice low and gruff.

  ‘I think so,’ she replies breezily, ‘but I haven’t booked it in yet.’

  His expression is impossible to read. ‘We should talk about this, Oli. Properly.’ He glances at the girls and sighs. ‘It’s a big deal and …’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘It’s just different to what you were saying last year.’ He puts the plate down and moves closer, adding in a whisper, ‘You know that if it happens, it happens. I thought the girls were enough. I thought I was.’

  Oli tilts her head. Takes a step backwards. ‘Am I not allowed to change my mind?’

  He gives her a look and clears his throat. ‘Let’s talk later.’

  She instantly regrets being deliberately obtuse. Echoes of her eruption a fortnight ago ring in her ears; for some reason, all the thoughts and feelings she’d been ignoring for months finally bubbled over. Playing mother to the twins isn’t enough—it hasn’t sated her maternal desire as she’d hoped it would. She and Dean had been curled around each other in bed talking about Christmas plans, then out of nowhere she found herself rushing off to sob in the ensuite. As she tried to explain, Dean hovered around her and wiped tears from her cheeks, but she saw the surprise in his eyes. ‘I didn’t think you wanted a baby this much?’ he murmured uncertainly.

  ‘I’m probably too old anyway,’ Oli said. ‘I’m almost forty.’

  ‘The youngest, hottest almost-forty-year-old I’ve ever known.’

  She raised the idea of going to see a fertility specialist and Dean listened and nodded, then kissed her eyelids and ran her a bath, gently washing every inch of her, drying her and carrying her back to bed, holding her until she fell asleep.

  They haven’t spoken about it until now, although she has sensed Dean has wanted to. She feels ashamed, ungrateful. She isn’t exactly sure what she wants to say, isn’t really sure what she wants, and it feels easier just to let days slide by. To say nothing.

  Dean knocks back the last of his smoothie. Tickles his daughters and ruffles their hair. Then, in an obvious attempt to make peace, he grabs Oli from behind, briefly pressing his body against hers. He curls a hand around each wrist, pinning her to the bench, his hot breath snaking into her ear. ‘You make me so crazy. I can’t wait to be in bed with you tonight.’ He pulls her hands together and places his left one over them both, then kisses his way up her neck.

  She hates when he does this in front of the girls, but in spite of herself heat zaps through her. For a minute it’s like how it used to be, when they would meet in dark bars to have drinks and dinner over candlelight, their limbs tangled in a dimly lit corner. When their nights were full of exquisite delayed gratification.

  Kate shrieks again, shattering Oli’s reverie. She wriggles out of Dean’s hold and hastily wipes the bench with a cloth. The newsreader drones on in the background.

  Oli pulls into the waiting bay at the McDonald’s on Spencer Street, two blocks from the office. Rolls all the windows down and blows a neat line of cigarette smoke skyward, her phone pressed to her ear. She has tried to quit many times since taking it up in her late teens but has never been entirely successful, because she finds it incredibly anchoring. She’s pretty sure Dean knows she smokes, but he never mentions it, and she goes through the motions of hiding the paraphernalia, eating mints and dousing herself in perfume before she comes home. Occasionally at the dinner table he’ll quote some shocking statistic about smoking-related diseases or talk about how some guy from the office is quitting. Oli just murmurs generically while the girls declare their outright hatred for all smokers.

  ‘Your car smells like fire,’ Kate said earlier, climbing into the back seat of the Audi and wrinkling her tiny nose.

  ‘Hmmm, it does a bit, how strange,’ Oli replied vaguely, before launching into a one-sided Q&A about the school day ahead.

  Now she mutters, ‘Come on, come on,’ eyes on the fast-food restaurant window. The piano music on her call comes to an end and a jaunty violin track begins. As she and the girls left the house, one of the researchers at the paper texted through the phone number of a business where a young woman Oli has been trying to track down allegedly works. The piece Oli’s been putting together, on abuse in the prostitution industry, has been dying a slow death over th
e past few weeks, but if she can find this woman and get her to go on the record, she might be able to revive it. After a promising chat with the girl’s manager, she’s been on hold for almost ten minutes.

  Dawn McGill, Oli’s editor, calls her for the second time since she’s been on the phone. She flicks Dawn a text and gets a response barely a second later: CALL ME ASAP.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she mutters. Dawn only has one mode: urgent.

  Oli scrolls through Twitter while the violin plays. A new pollie sex scandal. A sick elephant at Sydney Zoo. More madness from Trump. Madness everywhere.

  ‘Here you are!’ chirps a cheerful teenager wearing a headset. She hands Oli her order and flashes a smile peppered with metal. ‘Have a nice day!’

  Oli extinguishes her cigarette on the corner of the car mirror and wedges the butt there. Taking a bite of the muffin, she relishes its salty flavour. She used to come here about three mornings a week; she loved nothing more than to park herself on one of the plastic tables upstairs at 6 am with a Bacon & Egg McMuffin and a steaming black coffee, and pound out the draft of a story. But it feels wrong to leave the house when Dean and the girls are still sleeping.

  Holding the food in one hand, Oli noses back into the morning traffic. She’ll be pushing it to make the editorial meeting, but she needed a moment to herself after dropping the girls off. Even after short stints alone with them, she feels untethered. She can’t seem to relax in their company, her nerves screaming like cicadas. It takes all of her energy to play mother.

  Fortunately, signing them in was quick this morning. Amy and Kate hung their bags on the hooks in the entrance and floated off, whispering to each other without giving Oli a backwards glance. Even though she finds their rare displays of affection uncomfortable, indifference is worse.

  She hasn’t spent much time with other kids—her sister has none and her small friendship group is largely childless—but even she can tell the girls are different from their peers. They are so insular, so serious. Is it just because they’re twins, she wonders for the millionth time, or is it grief? She can’t bring it up with Dean; she knows too well the way his muscles will stiffen and his jaw tense, and the odd tone that will creep into his voice. It’s the reaction he has whenever she expresses an opinion about his daughters. As far as he’s concerned, the four counselling sessions they had after Isabelle died did the trick. Case closed.

  Oli wolfs down the rest of the muffin, demolishes the hash brown and drowns the lot with boiling coffee. The past twelve months have been a crash course in parenting, and she still hasn’t adjusted to the constant weight of responsibility she now carries. It’s relentless—and, if she’s completely honest, an unwelcome addition to her life. Her thoughts are often split in two, her impulses dulled and wrestled into submission. An invisible anchor connects her to Dean and the girls, creating a sense that she shouldn’t let her work come first, or that at the very least, she should feel bad if it does.

  Your own child will be different. You will want to feel the constant attachment.

  Oli registers the disloyal thought and hates herself for it.

  The Christmas holidays will be a much-needed circuit-breaker: ten nights in Vietnam, babysitters for the girls. She can’t wait. Just the thought of time with Dean, away from real life, makes her skin tingle. Although admittedly, the September school holidays are only a few days away and Dean and the twins are going away without her, and she’s looking forward to the time alone this will grant her almost as much as the Vietnam trip. Possibly even more. She groans. Her head is all over the place. Maybe Dean’s right—maybe she should take a step back at work, ease her foot off the pedal.

  The food sits uncomfortably in her stomach. No wonder she can’t get pregnant, she keeps stuffing her face with fast food and cigarettes. She presses her lips together, the violin music grating on her nerves. In fits and starts, she applies the last of her make-up. Red light, lipstick. Red light, mascara. Nothing can mask her lack of sleep.

  Did she turn on the alarm system at the house? Dean is fastidious about it, but she always forgets. Did she? She just can’t remember.

  The call disconnects as she hastily finds a spot in the staff car park, and low electronic beeps replace the violin, pulsing through the car. ‘Damn it.’ She brushes ash from her skirt as she winds up the window. Her phone rings again: Dawn. She glances at the cigarette butt and the greasy rubbish she shoved in the door console, feeling as full of regret as she does of food. She’ll clean the car later.

  She dives into the lift, spritzing perfume all over herself. Her phone buzzes in her bag. ‘Jesus, I’m coming,’ she mutters. Notepad in hand and a mint in her mouth, she enters the stuffy editorial room right on eight, holding out her phone and smiling at her boss, who still has her own phone to her ear.

  Dawn doesn’t smile back. ‘Where the fuck have you been, Oli?’ Her densely freckled face is a mottled red.

  TJ is sitting at the head of the narrow table. Pia taps away on her laptop at the other end, her phone wedged between her shoulder and her cheek. ‘Right, right,’ Pia is saying, ‘yep, send it to me.’ She glances briefly at Oli, but her expression doesn’t change. ‘No, I can’t right now.’

  The smile fades from Oli’s face. Dawn has the same wild-eyed look she had when they made the staff cuts in June. Oli swallows. There have been rumours of redundancies for weeks, and she knows she’s been off her game lately—all year, if she’s honest—and Dawn has always liked TJ more than her.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Oli hates how husky her voice sounds; at times like this, her distinctive baritone feels so inappropriate.

  Dawn folds her arms and sticks out a hip. ‘There’s been a development in the Housemate Homicide case.’ She pauses. ‘They’ve found Nicole Horrowitz.’

  SATURDAY, 3 OCTOBER 2005, LATE AFTERNOON

  Alex tries to pinpoint the moment it all went wrong. Her life sprawls out behind her, a series of twists and turns, all leading to one horrible moment. Which decision was the one that upset the balance? Which choice hurtled her so unrelentingly toward chaos? Her mind latches on to scenes from faded memories, wispy half-forgotten conversations, and others so startlingly clear they feel artificially planted in her mind. Of course, she knows there was no one thing: hers was a gradual fall from grace.

  Earlier, at the house, she felt calm. Even with the screams and the blood, the same questions over and over, she had a sweet sense of being stripped back to her most basic form. She was aware of her fingers, her toes. She traced her ribs and clutched her kneecaps. Things that usually hustled for her attention were gone, and nothing mattered except for the slow beat of her heart.

  But now ripples of shock rake painfully over her body, each wave crushing another part of her. Lungs, liver, heart.

  The detective said she’d only be a moment, but it feels like she’s been gone for hours. Alex looks around the small room: plain walls that were once white but now carry a beige tinge, scuffed grey lino, a square table made of some nondescript substance, a mirrored rectangle along the wall in front of her. A bit like a cell. Maybe it’s intentional, an attempt to ease occupants into the idea of gaol. Alex rubs her eyes and looks at her reflection. Presumably people are watching her from the other side like they do in the movies—talking about her, judging her, wondering how the nice-looking girl could have killed her best friend. Vomit surges in Alex’s throat, and she grips the side of the table, swallowing desperately. The acid taste is putrid, and she sips water from the glass the detective gave her.

  Despite her winter coat and boots, she’s freezing. Cold from the inside out. Bones and heart of ice.

  Maybe she should have stayed in the hospital—the young doctor with the kind eyes had encouraged it—but after being examined, her body scraped for evidence and photographed like a corpse, all Alex wanted was to get the police interview over and done with.

  ‘Am I under arrest?’ she asked the officer with her at the hospital, after she’d finally been allowed to shower. Her
hair was wet and combed, her face scrubbed clean of make-up and blood.

  The cop was young, probably not much older than Alex. His features were too sharp to be handsome, and a thin white scar from the corner of his mouth to the middle of his left cheek gave him the impression of a hooked fish that had put up a fight. Clearly, he was guarding her, hovering in the periphery as she was guided through various examinations, her body scoured for clues. ‘Not at this stage,’ he replied stiffly, avoiding eye contact.

  A flutter of something stirred then, the oddness of the situation so intense that Alex wanted to laugh. To scream. To rot into the earth, all traces of her existence erased.

  She looks at the door. A laminated piece of paper spruiks a reminder to turn off the lights. Evelyn was always yelling at Alex and Nicole to switch the lights off; raging at them about waste and the environment, and the electricity bills. They rolled their eyes and laughed, flicking the lights on and off until eventually Evelyn laughed too, more exasperated than annoyed, declaring them a lost cause.

  Alex sips more water, then crosses her arms and glances at the cheap-looking clock on the wall: almost 5 pm. She hasn’t slept in close to forty hours.

  A faint tapping precedes the door swinging open. The detective is back, and there’s another person with her, an older man with silver hair. They take seats opposite Alex. Lace their fingers and lean forward, expressions solemn. The detective waits for Alex to make eye contact before saying, ‘Alex, this is Chief Inspector Bowman. We’re going to ask you some questions now, okay?’

  Alex nods, swallowing furiously.

  Bowman presses a button on a device sitting at the edge of the table; Alex hadn’t noticed it was there. ‘DS Yardley and CI Bowman interviewing Alexandra Michelle Riboni on Saturday, 3 October 2005 at 5.11 pm.’

  Despite her masculine business suit, Detective Yardley reminds Alex of a ballerina. Her dark hair is pulled into a high bun, her thick brows perfectly symmetrical above her pale blue eyes. She blinks, slowly, deliberately. Alex recalls a porcelain doll she had as a little girl.