Page 19 of The Heir Apparent
I helped her wash her face, knowing that wearing a full face of makeup to bed was a greater sin than eating pasta with cheese.
“Do you want me to sleep in here with you?” I asked as I tucked her into the enormous bed obscured under a seemingly endless topsoil of neutral linen cushions. “Or I can just put a bucket by the bed.”
“I don’t need you,” she moaned. “You always think I need you.”
I couldn’t find a bucket anywhere in the apartment, so I left a crystal punchbowl on the bedside table.
Upstairs, in the dark guestroom, the bed rolled under me like a ship. This room had once been Mum’s office, but her desk had been replaced with one of those expensive stationary bikes.Louis’s dress watch sat on the bedside table next to a carafe of water. His clothes hung in the closet and his gym bag lay on the floor.
I pulled my phone out of my hoodie and called Jack. He picked up on the second ring.
“Lex,” he said.
“Hello.”
Even with a belly of gin, I was unaccountably shy, as if thousands of miles didn’t separate us. I imagined the undersea cable running along the seafloor to connect our voices, passing through the Malacca Strait, the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, the Suez Canal, which laid bare my family’s waning influence.
“What time is it there?”
“I dunno, 3 a.m.? I’m a bit jet-lagged,” I said.
“How are you?”
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, but found that just made the spins even worse.
“I’m alright,” I lied. “I forgot what it’s like here. My uncle’s had me and Amira kicked out of the palace.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The apartment I grew up in.”
I could hear voices around him and I realised I’d caught him in the middle of his work day. He would be between the vines. His t-shirt would be dampened with sweat in the January sun and he would take off his hat so he could run his forearm across his brow.
“Is it really an apartment?” he asked.
“They call it an apartment but it’s four storeys high.”
A comfortable silence settled between us, like it used to in the old days. The “old days” were only days ago, but I suspected they were already lost to me. Sometimes we used to talk on the phone with just the wall separating our rooms. I would get into bed and dial his number. He wouldn’t even say a word, just open the line and place the phone on the pillow beside him.
“What are you doing?” I would eventually ask.
“Just lying here. What are you doing?” he’d respond, his voice more vibration than sound, striking a chord inside me that I didn’t care to examine.
Finn and I had moved in with Jack seven years earlier, when he needed housemates and we needed a safer place to live. His place was on the family property, a sandstone cottage, partially buried in a tumble of jasmine. The best part of the cottage was the converted, slope-roofed barn attached to its side. Jack insisted I have it, while he and Finn took the bedrooms in the main part of the cottage.
When we first moved in, I found Jack alarmingly attractive. I was relieved that he had a girlfriend, Georgia, who bought and restored antiques before selling them at a breathtaking mark-up on Instagram. She wore paint-splattered Blundstones and overalls. She came from a nice Tasmanian family, which, unlike mine, had never inflicted colonial trauma on the entire planet. With her sweet face and her useful hands, she was basically perfect for him. I swiftly turned her into my friend to annihilate my tiny crush on Jack and ensure he remained out of reach. But when Georgia received an offer to work with a famous furniture restorer in New York three years ago, Jack declined to go with her. On the night she left, I dialled his phone across the wall to make sure he was okay. It was a habit we had never attempted to break.
“I’m really sorry about your dad and Louis. I don’t know if I had a chance to say that before.”
I said nothing for a long moment. “How long did it take you to get over your dad’s death?”
“Well, I was eight, so it’s probably a bit different,” he said. His father had fallen off a ladder trying to fix a shingle on the roof of the main house. It was only a few metres, and he’d seemed fine. By the time anyone realised the knock to his head had triggered a catastrophic bleed, it was too late to save him. Jack had watched as his dad staggered, then swayed like a felled tree, dead before he hit the ground. “How long did it take you to get over your mum?”
“I’m still waiting.”
He was quiet for a while. “Yeah. Same, I guess.”
“Hey,” I asked suddenly, “before the helicopter came, do you think we were about to kiss?”
