Too Close to Home Read Free

career terrifies me.’
    Freya had never told her what she thought of her last film. None of them had. Except Anna. Anna had lied, complimenting her on the complexity of the work and the surety of her vision. Freya had stepped back from the conversation, one eyebrow raised as she listened, her amusement at the performance tinged with discomfort.
    â€˜It’s called taking care of my next job,’ Anna hadsaid unapologetically when Freya had teased her about it afterwards.
    â€˜The industry here is so bloody small, and completely unprepared to take any kind of risk. All they want are happy, feel-good stories. And it’s not just film. You must see it in theatre too,’ Louise continued, and Freya wished she’d gone out for a cigarette after all.
    She agreed, and then said she had to go to the loo, she’d be back in a minute, and as she edged her way between the wall and the table, she leant down towards Anna in passing. ‘Having a good time?’ she asked. Anna squeezed her hand.
    â€˜Fabulous,’ she replied, and she looked as though she really were.
    In fact, as Freya glanced up and down the length of the table to see them all, her friends for at least two decades, eating, laughing, leaning forward in conversation, pouring more wine, they all seemed to be enjoying themselves.
    Sitting in the toilet cubicle, under a buzzing fluorescent light, she stared up at the window and out to the night sky, black and still. A plane roared overhead, the noise deafening in the silence of the bathroom. If she were outside, she would see the cold metallic sweep of its underbelly, almost close enough to touch, followed by the choking trail of fumes.
    When it passed, she could hear the sounds from the restaurant again. Someone was laughing loudly but she could not quite place who it was. Outside, people were talking. It was Matt and Mikhala. She listened closely, but she couldn’t make out their conversation.
    She washed her hands, the pink liquid soap sweet and sickly, and stood for a moment with her back against the cool of the bathroom tiles. It was then that she heard him speak again, and this time, she managed to discern the words: ‘I guess I’m just bored’, floating up to her with a clarity that was surprising.
    Leaning in to the mirror, she looked at herself. She dried her hands slowly. Was it his work? Or the night itself with the same faces (lately this had come to be more and more of an irritation for him), and the same talk? Perhaps it was her? She splashed her face, the water cool on the heat of her skin as she edged away from this last possibility.
    From outside, she heard footsteps now, the crunch of the gravel as one or both of them ground out their cigarette butts, and from somewhere in the distance, the slow scrape of a goods train, metal wheels on metal track.
    Breathing in, she tied back her hair, twisting it into a knot at the nape of her neck, and rubbed a finger under the smudge of mascara around her eye. Opening the door to the restaurant, she stood still for one instant, before making her way back to where they were all sitting, her friends, there at the table on the other side of the room.

 
    IT IS HOT AND still on the afternoon that Matt first sees Shane again. He is out on the street unpacking the car after their weekend away. They had promised Anna and Paolo they would all go to Paolo’s place in the country for a smaller celebration, but none of them had been able to find a spare weekend until some weeks after her birthday.
    â€˜For someone who didn’t want to acknowledge the event, she’s done a good job of marking it,’ he’d complained.
    Anna had been depressed, as he’d known she would be, and Paolo’s thirteen-year-old daughter, who was in Australia for the month, had only added to the heaviness of the atmosphere. She and Anna had sat on the verandah flipping through old magazines, making disparaging remarks about the