Truly Madly Guilty

'I remember. How are you?' said Tiffany.

'Not great. This constant rain is doing my head in,' said Lisa. She surveyed Tiffany. 'You look well. Do you take some sort of secret supplement?'

'Caffeine?' said Tiffany.

'Seriously, it's a pleasure to look at you.'

Tiffany laughed uneasily. Was she about to say, 'I understand my husband used to pay good money just to look at you'?

'Are you buying Cara's school uniform too?' said Tiffany. She knew that the uniform shop, run by 'our lovely volunteers', opened for just forty-five minutes at this time and 'strictly no longer' and it was 'first in, best dressed (literally!)'.

Would it seem odd that she remembered Lisa's daughter's name? Suspicious?

'Actually, I'd already bought her uniform but I'm bringing it back,' said Lisa. 'We're moving to Dubai for the next five years, so Cara won't be attending Saint Anastasias after all.'

'Oh, well that's ...' Tiffany tried to think of a more appropriate way to end the sentence rather than 'wonderful news', although paradoxically, irrationally, she found herself feeling almost disappointed. She liked Lisa. It's a pleasure to look at you. Who actually said that? It was nice.

'How do you feel about that?' she said.

'I'm trying to feel okay about it,' said Lisa. 'We did the expat thing when the kids were little and it was all fine, but I just don't think I have the energy to do it again. We're very settled in Sydney and this just came out of the blue. It happened on Wednesday, the same day as the Information Morning, actually ... My husband hears about some marvellous, incredible opportunity that he can't pass up or ... or some bullshit.' She put her hand to her mouth. 'Probably shouldn't swear on Catholic school grounds.' She looked up. 'God won't like it.'

'Don't you have a say in the matter?' said Tiffany.

Lisa raised a hand in defeat. 'Some battles can't be won and this is one of them. I don't think it rains much in Dubai. So that's something.' She suddenly thrust out the bag she held in her hand. 'Here. Take it. Got the lot there. Our kids looked about the same size. I can't be bothered going through the rigmarole of getting my money back. Roxanne Silverman runs the uniform shop. She always asks me if I've lost weight, which is her passive aggressive way of saying I need to lose weight.'

Tiffany took the bag unwillingly. 'I'll pay you.'

'Nope!' said Lisa. 'Take it. I insist. Apparently we can afford to lose all those non-refundable deposits on school fees.'

'Please,' said Tiffany. 'Please let me give you ...' She put the bag at her feet and began trying to get her wallet out of her handbag while still holding her umbrella.

'I'm off. You take care,' said Lisa. She turned on her heel and walked away, her umbrella blowing sideways.

'Well, thank you!' called out Tiffany.

Lisa raised her umbrella in acknowledgement and kept walking.

Tiffany watched her go. A bell rang and a babble of girlish voices rose from the nearest building like a flock of seagulls. Seagulls with nice private schoolgirl accents.

She thought about Lisa's husband.

Lisa's husband was a polite, softly spoken man. He had been interested in Tiffany's degree. He'd liked her schoolgirl outfit best: a green and white checked uniform not dissimilar to the one still in its cellophane wrapper in the bag she now held; the one his daughter would have worn if she'd attended this school. Lisa's husband drank Baileys and milk. A girly drink, she used to tease him about it. Lisa's husband used to slip a huge wodge of tipping dollars into her garter in one go, instead of making her work for them, or worse, teasing her, as if the tipping dollars were dog biscuits. Fuck that.

Lisa's husband had taken her out a few times after work. Once he'd come to see her perform in the day and after she finished work they couldn't find anywhere open for lunch so he'd booked a hotel room just so they could order room service. It had been a revelation to Tiffany: how you could use money to manipulate your world. When things went wrong you just waved your credit card like a magic wand. After lunch he'd gone back to work and she'd had a free hotel in the city for the night. She'd invited some of her uni friends over to stay. None of them believed she hadn't slept with him, but she hadn't. They'd just eaten club sandwiches and watched a movie. He had been a friend. She'd been like his hairdresser, except she hadn't cut his hair, she'd danced for him. Their relationship had felt wholesome.

It was maybe a whole year after that, after she'd given him a private show, that Lisa's husband had asked Tiffany, in his polite, reticent way, if she'd ever seen that movie, Indecent Proposal? The one with Robert Redford and Demi Moore? The one where Robert Redford paid some obscene amount to sleep with Demi Moore?

Tiffany had seen the movie. She understood the question.

'One hundred thousand dollars,' she'd told him, before he'd even asked.

She had pitched it low enough to be a possibility, but high enough so it was still a joke, a dare, a fantasy, and it didn't make her a hooker.

He hadn't hesitated. He'd said, 'Will you take a cheque?' It was a company cheque, from 'Something-or-other Holdings', and it was enough for the deposit on the apartment she'd bought at the auction where she'd met Vid. It had laid the foundation of her financial fortress.

She'd always told Vid that she'd never slept with any of her clients - she was a dancer, not a hooker - and it still felt true. What happened with Andrew was a one-off with a wealthy, older friend. A joke. A dare. A fun idea. She might have done it for the cost of two drinks if she'd met him in a bar and he'd made her laugh. Even after she had slept with him she'd still felt like their relationship had a kind of wholesomeness to it. They had straightforward, missionary-position sex with a condom. She had a dirtier relationship with Vid.

She remembered that afterwards, while they were in bed together, Andrew had begun to talk about a one-bedroom apartment he owned in the city, something about a trust, something about tax advantages. It took her a while to catch on that he was offering her an 'opportunity'; a mutually beneficial, long-term arrangement. She had politely declined. He'd said to let him know if she ever wanted to reconsider.