Page 30 of Power Moves
‘As opposed to when you’re at home and have a different girl over every night?’
Archie’s eyes skate to mine. ‘You know that’s not how I roll.’
I laugh. ‘Sorry,twogirls every night. I didn’t mean to understate your playerness.’
Archie’s knee starts jiggling to an invisible beat. ‘You know I don’t have time for a love life.’
‘You do file stories at weird hours,’ I admit, thinking of the one that popped up at 3.03 a.m. on News.com.au the other day.
He shrugs. ‘The only women I have time for are my mum, fascinating political characters such as Nancy Miller, and you.’
I roll my eyes. Archie has always had the gift of making people feel like they’re special. It’s how he wrangles so many exclusives.
‘I bet you have literally forty girls on your call list. Maybe forty-five.’
Archie laughs quietly to himself, not meeting my eye. ‘I promise, if there were women in my life, you’d know about them.’
‘How are Whitney and Britney?’ They’re the only women he’s really told me about—apart from one called Charlotte and another called Sarah—but I prefer discussing Whitney and Britney, for obvious reasons.
‘I told you,’ says Archie. ‘I only went on a few dates with both of them.’
‘That’s a shame,’ I muse. ‘They sounded fun. Maybe next time you should date a Mariah or a Carly Rae.’
Archie presses his shoulder against mine in a gentle shove. ‘You’re annoying.’
I chuckle, delighted to have achieved my daily target; the same dopamine hit you get from an Apple Watch buzzing when you reach your ten thousand steps. ‘So are you,’ I reply.
We’re silent for a few contented moments as the sky outside transforms from pink to purply-blue and the amber streetlights slowly blink to life. My gaze floats to Archie’s knee,resting next to mine, and a memory resurfaces: a night when my skirt was much shorter and a frangipani tree sweetened the air that was as warm as my skin.
‘I need to go,’ I say, abruptly. A sudden claustrophobia is clawing at my chest. I try to stand up but I’m still wedged into the window seat. If I wasn’t wearing one of my standard-issue pencil skirts I’d try to leap over him.
‘Okay,’ Archie says, standing up to give me space. ‘But are we even now? Does this excursion make up for your brother’s birthday?’
My mind drifts to that phone call with Dad, to the Coles mud cake I never got to eat, to the hours I wasted studying the intricacies of the TikTok algorithm, and it lands on a memory of a corner bench in a courtyard, a frangipani petal, two sets of long legs and a whole lot of feelings I’d rather not be reminded of.
‘Archibald,’ I croon sweetly, ‘we will never be even.’
CHAPTER 14
When we’re on tour, there’s a tradition that Boss will shout dinner so long as he gets to choose the wine. When I first started working for him I was still in my goon- and-UDLs era, so this was quite the novelty. Nowadays it can be tiring. Every night involves a champagne to start, a crisp white with entrees, a shiraz or a merlot with mains, then, if anyone’s up for it, an espresso martini to finish. The amount of sleep I’ve lost after drinking crappy espresso martinis made by spotty teenagers googling the ingredients in brick-walled country pubs is frankly depressing, but when Boss gets an idea in his head, he’s like a labrador with a stick (ebullient and annoying) and I can’t bear to hurt his feelings.
Tonight, as the waitress delivers an entree of what looks like breadcrumbed carpet scraps (a horrifying appropriation of salt and pepper squid), the light is flickering above us. There’s a bogong moth caught in the fixture.
Press tours to regional towns always involve an intriguing game of country-hospitality turf wars. The politicians and their staffers are often clued up enough to book the best accommodation in advance, whereas the journos usually end up in the unrenovated motor lodges. As payback, the journos stake out the best pubs and cafes, which means we have to avoid them, lest we be overheard and/or photographed saying or doing anything incriminating. That’s why tonight we’ve found ourselves eating at a pub with a sign out the front that says THE DROVER’S ASS. (Apparently the ‘P’ fell off in the eighties.)
My chair has a wobbly leg, so I’m trying to coax it into stability with a strange hip-shifting motion, as though I’m surfing with my butt cheeks. Two men at the bar wear bumbags and leather vests emblazoned with the wordsBAD BROS. Tufts of underarm hair protrude from their armpits, as if a few defenceless animals are trapped under there. Given both men have similar levels of muscle mass and body hair, I’m inclined to think theBROSlabel might be factual. And if that part is correct, I’m doubly inclined to believe theBADpart. One of them is openly staring at Boss’s Rolex.
‘Boss,’ I whisper, leaning over the table, ‘I think we should skip the wine tonight.’
‘Why?’ he asks, setting down the vinyl-covered wine list next to the plate of ‘food’. ‘There’s a 2017 merlot here that could be magnificent.’
This is the naivety of Boss. He thinks this random lowlife pub has been cellaring a merlot since 2017. He doesn’t realise they haven’t reprinted the menus since then.
I surreptitiously angle my head towards the bikies and jerk my eyelids, hoping he’ll pick up what I’m putting down. The bikies are ginormous. Even with my well-practised self-defence skills, if they became aggressive I couldn’t take both of them, and I would never assume Boss would be of any help in a fight—he’s too floppy-haired.
Boss’s face torques in confusion, which I should have expected. Why would he feel threatened by two hairy men, one of whom appears to be missing his front teeth? If they do anything untoward, he can always make a quick call to the state police minister. Or the Feds. In Boss’s world, you don’t need a strong left hook so long as you know the right people. His blissful ignorance would almost be endearing if it wasn’t my job to keep him alive and well for the next few weeks.
I sneak a peep at Rolex Eyes and accidentally catch his eye. He unfurls a smirk and winks at me from under a bristly eyebrow. A bolt of fear zips down my vertebrae.
