Pheasants Nest by Louise Milligan

Author:Louise Milligan [Louise Milligan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2024-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Guy had not grown up to be an amazing person. He had become more and more resentful of life, and women, as he got older.

Rebuffed at all turns by the stuck-up types who were the objects of his futile affections, in order to satisfy his sexual needs, he had turned to lower hanging fruit.

And that’s how, some years ago, he had come to meet Mandy King at Mount Johnson RSL.

16

MANDY

MOUNT JOHNSON RSL was a western Sydney megaclub lovingly referred to by its members and patrons as ‘Mo-Joe’s’.

A brutalist monolith of a building, it had a huge fountain in the entrance laced with giant fibreglass dugongs and, inside the venue, the flashing, coloured lights and monotonous trills of hundreds of poker machines. The carpet was luridly patterned in cobalt blue and aquamarine. There was a vaguely nautical theme, although the club was nowhere near the sea. It was, famously, the place where a failed political aspirant had given the most ungracious concession speech in living memory, keeping the party faithful waiting for hours as their fried morsels went cold and their beer went warm.

It was also the place that Mandy King liked to go out with The Girls when she needed a break from her kids and overbearing mother, Judy, at Acacia Hills. Mandy was quite partial to the pokies and on a Thursday night, she and her friends would go and pump some hard-earned cash into the machines and wait for the Over-28s disco to start. Then they’d dance around their handbags to ‘Groove is in the Heart’ and as the night wore on, get sexy to Prince’s ‘Cream’.

Mandy was somewhat awkwardly gyrating with her friend, faux-lesbian style, wearing a bandage dress and platformed heels, Midori Illusion shot glass in hand, when she caught The Guy’s eye.

Mandy King was not the type of woman The Guy would have naturally gravitated towards. But gravitating towards the wrong women had always ended badly for him. He looked at the short girl with the lank white hair and little upturned nose, throwing back emerald-green shots, her docile brown eyes shining with intoxication, and thought that she might do.

When he sauntered over to the bored and exhausted single mum, Mandy King thought he looked pleasant enough.

‘G’day, Blondie,’ he said. ‘Your hair is beau-ti-ful, tonight. Get it?’

Mandy blushed. ‘Oh, stop it.’

But she liked Blondie’s ‘Atomic’. And she liked the way his eyes crinkled up at the sides when he laughed. She thought his nails looked well-manicured and he seemed to take pride in his appearance. He was clearly pretty cut. Mandy had replaced her dope habit with the gym, following a twelve-step program by a celebrity fitness instructor that had seen her drop a good two dress sizes. So, she appreciated that he looked after himself. He seemed friendly and he was interested. Mandy King was in.

Their union started unceremoniously, in a disabled toilet at the Mount Johnson RSL. Mandy recalled him pressing her up against some rather cold tiles. Bobbing up and down

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