Читать книгу Number One Fan - Narrelle M Harris - Страница 6

The morning sun bled in through the uncurtained window and fell in a muted glow across the bed. Frank mumbled a complaint and burrowed into the pillow on the other side of the mattress, then woke at the absence of a warm body to cuddle into. He clutched at the cold pillow and tried to go back to sleep. He could hear Milo singing downstairs.

There are 132

Reasons why I’m not over you

Toast popped. The fridge opened and shut.

I keep an account of every one

But still, we are absolutely done.

‘You coming down, Bear?’ Milo shouted up the stairs.

‘G’waaaaaaaaaaay,’ Frank grumbled muzzily.

‘Coffee’s on!’

Frank dragged himself out of bed and pulled on a dressing gown while Milo sang on. He padded into the kitchen just as Milo reached the hook.

You’re a monster in a man suit.

Milo grinned at Frank. ‘That song’s going to be a hit for Gabey. The album is going to make her name. And yours.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. Come over here with your morning breath and gimme a kiss, my grumpy Bear.’

When Frank only blinked sleepily, Milo pushed a cup of coffee into his hands. Frank sipped gratefully.

‘Coffee breath kiss, then?’ Milo suggested hopefully. Frank tilted up his face and puckered his lips. Milo dropped a peck on his mouth.

Frank sipped more coffee and his brain cells began to stir. ‘Why in the name of everything holy did I have to fall in love with a morning person?’

‘So someone could make you coffee for the only two hours of the day when you don’t function as the most organised man in the southern hemisphere.’

Milo went back into the kitchen and Frank followed automatically behind. He leaned against the island bench, sipping espresso, while Milo stirred nuts and honey into some yoghurt.

‘You wearing anything under that robe?’ Milo asked, putting the yoghurt and a spoon on the bench for Frank.

‘Nope.’

‘Good man.’ Milo slid a hand up Frank’s thigh, patted his backside, gave Frank another kiss then turned to the fridge to fetch milk for his own coffee. He was singing a different song now.

You’re sending me a message

Are you telling me you love me

And sending me a selfie full of skin tones?

Frank, grinning, sipped again, then swapped coffee cup for yoghurt.

The dick pic song. Their old label would never have let them release that one. Hell, none of their songs since Ain’t Love Grand had been in the image Parrot Records wanted to project of Duo Ex Machina. Milo had thrown a spanner in those particular works by outing them on national television, even before his breakdown. Their history was one of the reasons Frank had been so keen to work with Gabey when she’d asked. She was shaking off an ill-fitting image as well. Nobody who’d written songs like 132 Reasons and Shotgun Breakup was ever going to wear the sugar-coated songbird sweetheart mantle for very long.

In the kitchen, Frank’s very own songbird sweetheart – dressed in running shoes, bum-hugging track pants and a loose T-shirt – was pouring a tall glass of orange juice, humming, and generally being devastatingly gorgeous, relaxed and happy, yesterday’s anxieties banished by the new day.

‘You’re meeting Gabey at the Toff today, aren’t you?’ Milo asked.

Frank swallowed a mouthful of breakfast yoghurt. ‘At eleven. Gabey hasn’t sung there before so I want to show her around before Thursday. Check out the set-up.’

‘Perfect. I’ll drop into Hardware Lane and do some admin. Tessa wants to set up an in-kind donation side of the Foundation for instruments, since the Mildura thing went so well.’

Frank’s expression must have betrayed concern. Milo halted in front of him. ‘I’m good, babe. Even when I take the stairs. Keeps my arse tight, yeah?’ A lascivious grin.

‘Are you implying my arse is flabby?’

‘Let me check.’ Milo ran both hands up Frank’s legs this time, underneath the robe, to squeeze the bare arse in question. ‘Feels fine to me.’

Frank set his pot of yoghurt down on the bench so he could reciprocate with his full attention, but before they could progress to really seriously debauching the kitchen surfaces, Milo kissed Frank on the nose and stepped away.

‘Appealing as you are in your peekaboo dressing gown,’ he said, drawing the robe closed over Frank’s nascent erection, ‘I need to go for my run, and you need a shave.’

Frank drew a hand across his morning stubble. ‘Go on then, you horrific morning person. Go give Carlton the treat of watching you jog through the park.’

Milo grinned again, kissed Frank on the forehead and headed out for his run.

‘Best. Bosses!’ declared Tessa again as Milo handed her a coffee from Federal Coffee Palace, which he’d picked up on the way past the café.

‘I’ve got biscotti too,’ he said, waving the paper bag enticingly.

‘All this and you pay me! You guys.’ She tucked a black corkscrew curl behind her ear as he pushed open the door to the foyer.

‘Your hair game is on fleek today.’

‘“On fleek”, Milo? Really?’

He laughed. ‘Tessa, I am down with internet lingo. I have a Tweeter.’

‘Twitter, you dag. And thank you, my hair is spectacular today. I found a hairdresser in Footscray that imports the hair oil I need.’ She walked up the stairs beside him, not even blinking that he’d ignored the lift completely. She told him about how well her father’s Ethiopian restaurant was doing since a review in The Age, and the recent graduation dinner they’d held for her youngest brother, now a qualified engineer.

Tessa opened the first floor door onto chaos.

At first it looked like a giant black feather boa had exploded all over the corridor. Dark feathers were scattered on the carpet in front of the costume shop and down to the Foundation’s front door. Some small, fluffy feathers were stuck on the walls, door handles and shop plaques.

‘Do you think rats could have done this?’ Milo asked, poking at a pile of shredded feathers with his shoe. ‘Do we have rats?’

Tessa had walked into the mess. ‘This is a whole costume,’ she said. The shreds of black material were easier to see now. Under a clump of cotton, polyester and feathers, a large vinyl beak was sticking out. She toed the debris away to reveal a crow mask. ‘If this was rats, we need to find another office. Or get a cat. Maybe a panther.’ She gave Milo a grin, deciding to find the weirdness funny, but he was standing at the door, all the colour drained from his face. ‘Milo?’

‘Looks like someone has a vendetta against crow costumes.’ He smiled shakily at her.

‘They’ll never get their deposit back,’ she agreed. ‘I better call Joel and let him know. Want me to call Frank?’

‘No, god no. He’s busy finalising the launch.’ The colour had returned to Milo’s face and he strode briskly through the wreckage of the bird costume to their office, unlocked the door and went inside.

Milo put his coffee and the biscotti on the desk. He could hear Tessa on her mobile phone in the corridor, calling the costume shop owner to explain what they’d found.

He sat on a chair, fiddling with the beads of his bracelet, and then let them go. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, breathing deeply in, blowing out through pursed lips. Breathing in. Blowing out.

He opened his eyes and made himself aware of everything around him. Five pens in the holder on the desk. The sound of Tessa’s voice. The weight of the leather bracelet on his wrist (weighted too with the memory of Frank giving it to him that day at the zoo). He counted the number of coffee beans in the poster. He heard cars driving down Little Bourke Street; the high-pitched ting of a bicycle bell; the deeper clang of a tram on Elizabeth Street.

Fear doesn’t rule me, he said quietly, out loud, feeling the touch of teeth on his lower lip on the ‘f’, the way his lips pressed together on the ‘m’. He didn’t even understand why the scene had so unsettled him.

His heart rate slowed.

He drew a deep breath and exhaled, and the world stopped tilting.

Tessa came in and began to close the door. Hesitated. Opened it again.

‘Close it, it’s fine,’ he said.

She did. ‘Joel’s coming over. He sounded really fed up. He says shit like this happens sometimes. Some dickheads think it’s funny. I’ll sweep the worst of it into a garbage bag, and you can read that file about in-kind donations I’ve put together. And get that look off your face, I put all the tax stuff at the back in an appendix.’

‘I can read tax stuff.’ Grumpily; very much not his usual sunny demeanour.

‘You hate tax stuff. That’s why you hired me: MBA Accounting and Finance.’ She struck a heroic pose. ‘She of the stunning brain and on fleek hair!’

She’d succeeded in making him laugh at last.

‘I should twitter a picture of your hair.’

‘You do know it’s “tweet” right? Oh, you bastard, winding me up like you don’t know what Twitter is.’

‘I’m 30-odd, not mummified.’

‘Coffee first,’ Tessa declared, ‘then I’ll bag up the bird explosion while you bone up on donations.’