Sharp Shooter Read Free Page B

dilapidated two-seater so that I could suck the chocolate coating off my second Tim Tam.
    ‘How you lose your job?’
    ‘I punched my boss.’
    He stopped munching for a moment, ‘Yes, tell more please.’
    ‘Well, it was complicated. I worked with this guy . . . and we both worked for an advertising consultant. Every time our boss walked into our office this colleague of mine’s aura shrank so small it almost disappeared. He was terrified of her. We never talked about it, but I could see. Anyway, this one time, I forgot to take my gym shoes after work and had to go back to get them. And I heard him in her office.’ I licked my chocolate-stained lips to calm my rising embarrassment. ‘He was screaming as if he was being tortured. Before I knew it, I’d run in and smacked her in the face. Knocked the whip right out of her hand.’ The memory burned the back of my eyeballs.
    Mr Hara began chewing with intensity again; eyes wide, as if he’d reached an exciting part in a movie.
    ‘See, he was tied upside down in her chair – naked butt in the air. Only it was consensual.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Who’d have thought it? The next day she called me in, said she no longer needed two assistants and told me to clear out my desk. I could have argued it, I guess, but I didn’t want to stay after that.’
    To his credit Mr Hara didn’t laugh, or call me an idiot like Bok had. ‘Sure, sure. You just gotta learn to read this stuff better.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘Little bit experience, lotta bit of learning.’
    He talked on and on then, about proxemics and gestures, until I started to twitch.
    ‘You getting cuckoo,’ he said, finally. ‘Go sleep on it and come back soon.’
    I filled in the time until my next class with Mr Hara by meeting Bok for coffee, and catching up with Smitty. Bok was on a salary so he paid for the vanilla slices, and Smitty was always good for a chicken and mayo sandwich if I turned up around midday.
    Dearest Smitty. Married. Kids. Well adjusted. Everything Bok and I were not. Smitty’s husband Henry Evans was an overworked GP and one of my favourite people – except when it came to me and Smitty.
    Henny had gone to one of Perth’s most elite boys’ schools and Smitty had gone to the nearby girls’ equivalent with moi . We all caught the same bus home from school and later, uni, until Henny bought his first car, a Holden Statesman, and then we drove with him. His mum still lived in the next street, two houses down from Smitty’s.
    Henny knew every scrape and best-forgotten incident Smitty, Bok and I had ever been involved in – which was fine until the day he and Smitts got married. The day she said ‘Yes, I do’ he started to say ‘No, you don’t go out with Tara to nightclubs.’ ‘No, you don’t go paragliding.’ ‘No, you don’t . . .’ Blah, blah, blah.
    His burgeoning domineering attitude had got right up my nose until Bok persuaded me it was a natural rite of passage, and that Henny would come to his senses when he realised he wasn’t having any fun.
    Smitty had taken the road of least resistance at first. Then she and Henny had their first kid, which pretty much wiped her out for most things anyway. To make it worse, she had twins a couple of years later. Everything had been chaotically hunky dory for them, until Claire – the oldest – developed Crohn’s disease. Claire was gorgeous, like a young, olive-skinned Cate Blanchett, but the pain, exhaustion and hospitalisations she endured, plus the all-round difficulty of having a chronically ill child, took its own kind of toll on the family. I couldn’t begin to understand it, but I loved Smitty for hanging tough.
    I babysat for her occasionally now that the kids were older and I wasn’t so afraid of dropping them. For her part, she always supported me whenever I went left field, including this time.
    ‘Mr Hara sounds like a hoot,’ she told me. ‘I say go for it.’
    At my next class, I smuggled a packet of mint slices