The Fix by Nick Earls

Author:Nick Earls [Name, Author]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities; sciences; social sciences; scientific rationalism
ISBN: 9781921596841
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2012-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

SO I WENT HOME with a suit that would do the job if I pulled the belt in and bunched the pants around the back. I’d had two suits in London, but gave them away as part of coming home, part of escaping a life in which suits had been obligatory.

When I left after dinner, Aphrodite was asleep in a beanbag, her sticky green man in her hand, and Darius was busy giving a new friend a pounding at Wii Tennis. ‘Uncle Josh, no, you have to play next,’ he said vainly, his eyes not leaving the screen as he swiped another clean winner down the line.

I hung the suit in my wardrobe, picked up my box of fortune cookies and slumped in front of the TV.

About a minute later, or in fact three hours, my phone rang cacophonously on my chest somewhere near the start of a dream about Britney Spears giving me a massage while I was lying face-up on a skateboard. The TV was playing a TeleCafe ad, offering the conversation of lingerie-clad women to lonely singles, and I was surrounded by fortune-cookie crumbs. There was a fortune tucked into my phone. It read: ‘A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.’

I flipped the phone open and made a noise that was supposed to sound like hello. I didn’t recognise the number.

‘Well, hello,’ a female voice said. My first thought was Britney Spears. I still wasn’t awake. ‘I know it’s late in the regular world, but I figured all you freelance journos are up doing Quaaludes or coked to the eyeballs.’

It was Hayley. I needed consciousness, wit, charm. Maybe a Quaalude, though I didn’t think I’d ever seen one outside the works of Hunter S Thompson. I still had Britney in my head, Britney as a cowgirl now, with very supple hands. Long thumbs. Tom Robbins.

‘Yep, that’d be me,’ I managed to say, brain still trundling along a track to nowhere. Hayley had not deleted my number. She had called it, and apparently deliberately. ‘Living the gonzo life. Hang on a second while I wipe some honey off these hookers.’

She laughed. I muted the TV, but kept it on so that I had some light. There were now two women in lingerie on screen, writhing on a chintzy bed together and yet inexplicably needing my call to make their evening whole.

‘Well, I’m done for the week,’ Hayley said. ‘This is five pm Friday for me. Five pm Friday and mid-semester break from uni. So do you want to . . . have a drink or something? Once the hookers are sorted?’

I stood up, flushed with the thought of a gonzo life involving a fabulous stripper girlfriend – hold the hookers, hold the honey – with non-ridiculous breasts and a sharp mind. Fortune-cookie crumbs cascaded to the carpet.

‘Definitely,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ I pressed my shirt flat, and it looked okay.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Well, maybe if you just come to the Spur? I’ll get changed and we can go somewhere .

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