Michelle Vernal Box Set Read online

  Carl was prone to histrionics and his life—from the outside looking in, at any rate—Annie thought, wasn’t too bad. He had gotten off scot-free in the quakes by being out of town on a fashion shoot when the big one of February 22nd back in 2011 had hit. When he arrived home, he might have found his city gone and its people grieving but his townhouse with all the latest mod-cons in the posh suburb of Fendalton was largely unscathed, as was David. There had been no port-a-loos set up on the street for him to share with his neighbours.

  His career as a freelance photographer was a lucrative one and the name Carl Everton could more often than not be spotted in the by-line of the likes of Fashion Quarterly. He was forever tripping off to the Islands for photo shoots or when he wasn’t working, to Melbourne and Sydney for four-star, long, lazy, foodie weekends. Until recently, he’d had his rather gorgeous de facto boyfriend accompanying him too. Annie reached over and rested her hand on his arm and as she did so, her diamond solitaire caught the sun. Its prisms of blue light didn’t fill her with the same sense of joie de vivre today that it had two years earlier when she had picked it out with Tony. She took a deep breath and tried to muster up the enthusiasm for the pep talk she knew was now required of her.

  “Listen, Mr Everton,” she prodded him in the chest, “you have a great life. As for you and David, you’ll patch things up. You always do, and what’s that saying? You’re only as old as who you are feeling?”

  Carl nodded.

  “Well, David’s only thirty-five, so there you go—you are nowhere near middle age.”

  “Humph, that’s easy for you to say. You’re still a babe in the woods and besides, I’m not sure I see myself with David for the long haul anyway. Not unless he starts putting me first for a change.”

  “Thirty-one does not make me a baby and I’ve heard that before too.”

  “It does when you’re an old man like me who is getting far too long in the tooth to play the kind of emotional on-again, off-again relationship games David seems to enjoy. Living with him is like being on a perpetual roller coaster.”

  “At least...”

  “Don’t say it.” Carl held a hand up to silence her and looked abashed. “I know you’re right and I do count my blessings every day, so just don’t say it, okay?”

  Annie nodded and left the words “at least you get a chance at being forty” hang on the crisp afternoon air like the halo of cigarette smoke that hovered over the little group gathered across the river.

  They sat in silence for a moment, each lost in their own thoughts, until Carl broke it when he decided it was time for a change of subject. “So, how is my main man Testosterone Tones doing these days?” He patted his pocket to reassure himself his trusty appendage, the latest, fresh-off-the-shelf iPhone was still there. “I saw on Facebook he had a ruggers win last weekend.” His upper lip curled in distaste. “I must say, I was impressed by the pic he posted of his teammate—Jason, was it? Did you know he can balance a jug of beer on his belly? I thought to myself, look out New Zealand’s Got Talent, here he comes.”

  Annie cringed at the thought of the latest round of boozy shots Tony had uploaded on the social networking site. Beer, beer, and more beer! was the after-match motto, win or no win. He was a bit of a living, breathing Southern Man cliché at times and lately he seemed to be getting worse. Or maybe she was just getting less tolerant because it was that side of him that had first attracted her to him.

  After what had happened to Roz, she’d had to grow up fast as she found herself catapulted from her role as the baby of the family to the strong one whom her parents leaned on. She’d wanted to find someone who would look after her for a change. By the time she met Tony, she’d had a succession of boyfriends who definitely were not keepers. The latest in the long line had been a namby-pamby life skills coach who hadn’t made the grade. She should have known better because instead of being on a date, she’d felt like she was the star of a self-help episode of Oprah with his need to analyse everything she said and did. Then, along came Tony—breath of fresh air, rugged, gorgeous Tony. Annie closed her eyes against the strong rays of afternoon sunlight that danced through the trees as she remembered.

  The dance floor had been dark but not dark enough that she couldn’t lock eyes with him as he jostled his teammates on the sidelines of the crowded floor.

  She’d leaned over to scream in her girlfriend Jo-Jo’s ear, “Hey, see that big guy over there—the touch rugby player with the dark hair?”

  Jo-Jo did a twirl to send her long, dark hair flying like a whip and screamed back over the top of the music, “Yeah, he’s not bad—quite nice, actually.”

  “I know. Keep your eyes and hands off because he keeps looking over at me.” Modesty went out the window after a few drinks when Annie and her pals all started to fancy themselves as New Zealand’s Next Top Model.

  Unbeknown to her, though, Tony was at that precise moment shouting in his mate’s ear, “Whoa, would you look at the set of hooters on Ginger Spice bouncing around over there.”

  Cyndi Lauper’s “Girl’s Just Want to Have Fun”—every party girl’s anthem—blared out and Annie put on a real tummy sucked in, boobs out show for that one and bopped around the pile of handbags tossed into the middle of the gaggle of girls, who all screeched along to the song. She knew with that confident certainty a woman in a little black dress has at twenty-five that when the song finished, the handsome stranger would come over and say hi. She was right.

  For her part, she’d admired his solid build as she followed him onto the dance floor a few wines later for a slow groove. She’d gazed into a pair of beautiful dark blue eyes and her last conscious thought before she homed in for a good old snog was such a waste, eyelashes like that on a man.

  For his part, Tony was attracted to Annie’s tangle of red curls—he’d always had a thing for Nicole Kidman and this much shorter, curvier version had a nose that was cute and upturned and her eyes were the exact colour of a green marble he’d once played with as a kid. Of course, it went without saying that the clincher was her all-important, must-have set of assets: a 36C cup size.

  When Annie removed her beer goggles, she discovered Tony really did have lovely eyes. His hair was black as night and cropped short. He had the muscle-bound physique of a man who played sports and the broadest shoulders she had ever had the opportunity to lean on. He was just what she’d been looking for and with a contented sigh, she’d snuggled into him for the long haul.

  Six years and a mounting house deposit later, Tony still liked to keep his hair short but these days he had loads of squiggly little grey ones beginning to sprout. He thought that these made him look distinguished but Annie thought they made him look like what he was: a thirty-five-year-old man who seemed of late to have developed a penchant for acting like a twenty-five-year-old. And when she was feeling particularly premenstrual or if they’d had a fight like the one they’d had over her new boots, she would think unkind thoughts and liken him to a freak of nature with pubic hair growing from his head!

  She had a horrible feeling, too, that he was a prime candidate for excess ear and nostril hair in later life. His father, Doug, happened to be the living proof of this. She shook the spectre of Tony and his hairy father away and turned her attention back to Carl, who would rather die than allow a stray grey make an appearance.

  “Tony is fine, thank you.” There was no love lost between the pair of polar opposites. It didn’t help that Tony flirted with homophobia. Whenever Carl was around, all his macho tendencies went into overdrive and he wound up acting like a complete Neanderthal. Carl didn’t exactly help matters, either, by camping things up as much as he could and revelling in Tony’s discomfiture.

  Annie shivered and rubbed her arms to ward off the cold. She wished she had brought a jacket with her instead of her flimsy cardigan. It was that time of year when you really needed to cart at least three changes of clothing around to cope with the variants in temperature throughout the day. No wonder Cantabrians we
re renowned for their conversational abilities when it came to the weather. It was like the Crowded House song “Four Season’s in One Day.”

  “He’s got his brothers over to play with the Ford this afternoon.” Tony claimed his newly acquired gleaming white beast of a motor vehicle, which had featured heavily as a rebuttal in the new boots argument, was a necessity. It was a tool of his trade as a plumber, he reckoned. Annie would have liked to argue that a brand-new Toyota Rav4 was a necessity for her role as a secretary, so why couldn’t she go get one but had kept quiet. In her opinion, a second-hand van would have done the job of carting his gear from job to job just as effectively as the Ford and as far as she was concerned, it was a prime example of big cars being extensions of—

  “Ugh, no, not the Brat Pack.” Carl derailed that train of thought as he muttered his nickname for the three Goodall boys.

  Craig, the youngest of the Goodall brothers at twenty-three, was currently doing a Bachelor of Commerce or was that Bachelor of Bonking? Annie wasn’t sure because the lines were blurred as to what he actually went to Canterbury University for. It seemed to her that the only slightly commercial thing he did was constantly cadge cash off family members. Stephen, the middle brother, was a roofer by trade, who, despite it being 2014, still sported a mullet. He had a penchant for hard-living, pool-cue-wielding women—a bit like his mother really, the bleached blonde family matriarch. Ngaire, clad in her skimpy tops and too tight jeans, sprang to mind.

  “And how is Mumsy-in-law?” Carl asked, as though reading her mind.

  Annie poked her tongue out at him. “She is not my mother-in-law yet and do you really want to know?”

  “I do actually.” This was said tongue-in-cheek as it was these two little words Ngaire Goodall hankered to hear between her oldest son and his fiancée. She was desperate for her big day.

  Annie filled him in on how she’d seen Ngaire last Sunday after Tony, bless him, had invited the entire Goodall clan over for an impromptu BBQ. She’d been standing at the kitchen sink with a mountain of carrots to peel alongside a cabbage to chop for a coleslaw when Ngaire, under the pretence of helping, had swayed inside. She had plonked her big leather-clad bum down at the kitchen table, staple G&T in hand. As she watched her don that petulant look so unbecoming on a woman pushing sixty, Annie knew what was coming next.

  “When are you and Tony going to set the date?”

  There was a blissful silence while she took a swig of her drink but then, not having gone into the anaphylactic shock Annie silently wished upon her, she’d swallowed and carried on. “What are you waiting for? You’re not getting any younger and once you pass thirty, it’s all downhill from there.” She shook her head. “There’s nothing worse in my opinion than a bride who is mutton dressed as lamb.”

  This coming from the long in the tooth, leather-clad apparition seated in front of her! Annie remained stoically silent as she carried on with her peeling.

  “By the time I was your age, Doug and I had been married for ten years and I’d produced three strapping boys who were already at school! Not that you’d have known I’d been pregnant once, let alone three times because my figure just bounced back. It does when you have your babies young, you know.”

  Blah-blah-blah. It was a speech Annie had suffered through many times before but on that particular afternoon, her hand had twitched uncontrollably. It had taken all her willpower not to shove the Majestic Red she was halfway through peeling somewhere where the sun don’t shine!

  “I tell you, Carl, Ngaire will never know just how close she came to spending the rest of her days walking round with a carrot up her arse!”

  Carl threw his head back and laughed. “She does have a penchant for dressing like a geriatric call girl but she may well have a point. You’ve been engaged forever and I’ve got a lovely little three-piece suit just dying for an outing hanging in my wardrobe.”

  It was the million dollar question really, Annie mused and something she and Tony didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry to answer. But as she had mentioned to Kas in her email, maybe it was time they talked about it. “Well, I did see a rather gorgeous dress the other day in the window of Modern Bride.”

  Carl clapped his hands, his face instantly animated as though someone had flicked a switch. “Right, sweetie, I want you to find out when they do a late night and we’ll make a proper date of it. Deal?”

  “Deal.” Annie shivered again and she realised they had begun the gradual slide towards winter. She glanced at her wristwatch. “Hey, it’s nearly four o’clock. We should probably make a move because when that sun drops, it will be freezing.”

  “You’re right.” Carl got to his feet and flicked his scarf over his shoulder before he linked his arm through Annie’s. “Are you on popcorn duty or am I?”

  Chapter Two

  “Can I tempt you with more popcorn, my sweet?” The bowl of salty, buttered popcorn was waved under Annie’s nose.

  “Shush, this is my favourite bit.” Her eyes didn’t move from the screen as she grabbed the bowl off Carl, scooped up a handful of the fluffy white snacks, and shovelled them in her mouth. She chomped furiously before she washed her mouthful down with a swig of bubbles. On Carl’s ginormous flat-screen television, an elegant blonde woman clad in black and white stood alongside a curvaceous black woman and had launched effortlessly into “Aria,” or the “Flower Duet” as the famous opera song was otherwise known. So electric was the concert’s atmosphere that it almost jumped from the screen into the living room. “Look, I’ve got goosebumps.” She rolled the sleeve of her cardigan up to prove her point. “I’d love to sing along with them. They make it look so easy but I’d never be able to hit those high notes.”

  “Please don’t attempt it. Personally, I always think of the old British Airlines add when I hear this song.” Carl sniffed, piqued at being shushed. It didn’t last long, though. “Ooh, look, there he is—Conan the Barbarian drummer!”

  A man with either a bad perm or just unfortunate natural curls, who was clad in a tightly fitted singlet, banged his bongos, or were they kettle drums? Annie was never sure but Carl didn’t care either way as he watched, mesmerised by the man’s biceps. His attentions were fickle, though, because when the star of the show himself appeared—a vision in head-to-toe white—Conan was forgotten.

  “Look, look there he is!”

  Annie wished he would stop poking her in the ribs; she wasn’t blind.

  “Oh my God, he’s so gorgeous. That soulful lost in the music look of his is just to die for. And the way he wiggles those hips and tosses his hair back! OOOH!” He gave a faux shudder. “It makes me melt every single time. I can see why Roz loved this concert. I never get sick of it.”

  “That’s because we only watch it once a year. I always think he looks like he is about to have sex or a really, good p—”

  “Don’t you dare blasphemy the Yanni!” Carl ordered and cut her off with a flap of his hand.

  Annie couldn’t help herself. New Age just didn’t do it for her, no matter how good the man was at playing with his synthesiser. All that long hair and droopy moustache—ugh, no thanks. As for the white silky trouser and shirt ensemble, well, it was all a bit too much in her book but hey, each to their own. There was no disputing the fact that he was phenomenally successful and her sister had adored him and the way he filled out the rear of those white pants too. She’d adored all things Greek, for that matter. Ah, Roz. Annie sighed and blinked back the familiar hotness that pricked at her eyes.

  The date of the concert was September the 25th 1993 and its setting was the truly spectacular Acropolis in Athens. It never failed to amaze Annie when the camera panned to where the world-famous outline of the Parthenon on top of the hill was perched overlooking the Herodes Atticus Theatre. The ancient buildings lit up against the backdrop of a night-time Athens sky were quite simply breathtaking.

  Oh yes, Greece was definitely on her bucket list, too. She’d always figured that she would go there with Ton
y one day. How romantic would a Greek island hopping honeymoon be? They could finish up at Eleni’s, and she could finally get to meet Kas and the rest of the Bikakis family in the flesh. It would be a dream come true. She sighed. It wasn’t on the cards, not with the state of their finances. There was the drudgery of saving for a house that seemed further and further away each time house prices increased, the Ford monster truck repayments, and okay, if she were really honest, the boots. They had been an unnecessary splurge, especially now that she had seen the dress, as she had come to think of it. If they ever did get round to setting a date, she’d be lucky to get a Registry Office service followed by a couple of nights caravanning in the nearby town of Ashburton for her honeymoon, let alone the dress of her dreams.

  Greece had been on Roz’s bucket list, too. That gorgeous Georges Meis print of the island of Santorini had hung on her bedroom wall for as long as Annie could remember when she was growing up. These days, the volcanic cliffside tumble of white buildings so starkly vibrant against an infinity of blue adorned her and Tony’s bedroom wall. The inevitable thoughts of how different things might have played out if Roz had spent her money on a trip to Greece instead of blowing it all on drugs crept into Annie’s thoughts. She swiped at her nose with the back of her hand as she remembered:

  The day it became clear to her that her adored big sister was a drug addict, she had been about to saw into an ice-cream cake. Her innovative mother had made the cake by turning a tub of vanilla ice-cream upside down and piping a big number eleven in pink cream on the top. She had then piped the same pink cream around the edges and voila! Annie had her birthday cake. It hadn’t been the fancy multi-flavoured cake she’d picked out from the Wendy’s ice-cream cake display but as her mother had explained to her, the choice was hers to make. The homemade cake and ice skating or the expensive cake and no skating.