She says, ‘Well, would you look at this nice freshly made bed.’

Callum squishes a pillow into a pillow slip. He looks blankly at the bed and says with endearing uncertainty, ‘Yeah?’

‘Don’t you think we should mess it up a bit?’

He drops the pillow and has her flat on the bed so fast she’s laughing while he’s kissing her, his hand on the back of her neck, his tongue in her mouth, and she must have been out of her mind to have thought of giving him away to another woman.

‘Eddie Ripple,’ says Sophie. ‘I haven’t seen you for thirty years. Can you believe we’re old enough to say, “I haven’t seen you for thirty years”? Did you ever think we’d get this old and still be us?’

She is sitting with ice wrapped up in a tea towel held against her hand while Eddie kneels with a dustpan sweeping up the broken cup. He looks up at her with exactly the same green eyes of the little boy who used to sit with her under the tuckshop stairs. The Blusher and The Twitcher. The Outcasts. The Spastics. The Retards.

He says, ‘I think I thought anything that happened to me after I turned thirty would be sort of irrelevant.’

His voice is deep with the slower rhythm of a laconic Australian farmer being interviewed on TV about the drought. Sophie can feel her own voice, her own heart beat, perceptibly slowing down to match his pace. He sounds like a country boy, and of course, she remembers, that’s what he’d become. His family had moved up to Queensland to live on a farm. Sophie, who only had very vague ideas about what the ‘country’ meant, had always imagined him going to a one-teacher school in a horse and buggy, with girls wearing bonnets, like in Little House on the Prairie.

‘I missed you when you left,’ says Sophie, remembering that all of a sudden as well. That first day at school without Eddie by her side had been like the first time she’d travelled to another country on her own. She’d felt simultaneously invisible and overly visible at the same time. She used to go to bed feeling sick about school the next day. She says, ‘But guess what? Then I got popular and I didn’t miss you at all.’

‘How did you manage that?’

‘My eleventh birthday party was a social coup. We got an in-ground swimming pool, you see, and my dad made this amazing slide into the pool. I became A-list after Dad built that slide. All the girls decided my blushing was cute and the boys pretended not to notice.’

‘I don’t think I missed you,’ says Ed, considering, and of course that was the thing about Eddie Ripple, he was always devastatingly honest. ‘Everything in Queensland was so different. We went to school barefoot. We caught yabbies in the creek at lunchtime. It just felt like I stepped into another world and you didn’t even exist any more–like my old bedroom, my old street, the whole state of New South Wales had just vanished. And then, thirty years later, I’m having dinner right here in this house, with Callum’s family, and they started talking on and on about this girl called Sophie who blushed, and I thought, How many blushing Sophies can there be in Sydney? And it all came back, all those conversations under the tuckshop stairs–I seem to recall discussing existential dilemmas with you, Sophie Honeywell, as well as making up bloodthirsty stories about how we’d get revenge on Bruno, and all the kids who were mean to us. Anyway, I kept remembering things while they were all talking about you, and then your ex-boyfriend, Thomas, pulled out a photo and there you were, all grown up and beautiful.’

‘Thank you.’ Sophie grabs hold of a blush and swiftly slays it. ‘Do you still twitch, Eddie Ripple? Seeing as you’ve opened the door on our disorders!’

He smiles. ‘Not as often, but if I’m nervous or stressed it comes back. I don’t worry so much about it these days.’

Sophie says, ‘How do you know Callum?’

‘I met him when I moved back to Sydney. I play saxophone in his band.’

‘So you were there on the Anniversary Night? Actually, I think I saw you and thought you looked familiar!’

‘Yep, but I never got a chance to say hello, and then when there was all the disaster with Grace’s allergic reaction I thought I’d leave it for another day. Callum told me you want to repaint this house, so I thought I’d come over and ask if you want me to quote on doing it.’

‘So is that what you do, paint houses and play the saxophone?’

‘I do a bit of this and a bit of that. I paint houses because I write poetry, and I’ve discovered the only way for me to write a poem is to paint a house. I manage a poem a room. The painting pays a lot better than the poetry. The problem is I paint slower than the average house-painter, so my clients have to be patient, but my quality is outstanding, if I do say so myself.’

‘Are you a published poet?’

‘Well, yeah. But it hasn’t exactly flown to the top of the bestseller lists. I actually think my mother might be responsible for all of my sales. She gives them away to waitresses in coffee shops. What about you? What did you end up becoming?’

‘Oh, well, I accidentally became a Human Resources Director for a company that makes lawnmowers,’ says Sophie.

‘Hey, did you know that our old nemesis Bruno is married with twins and working as a chartered accountant for one of the Big Six firms? I had a two-week fling with him.’

‘Really? Remember Gary Lochivich?’

‘I always thought he’d become a hairdresser.’

Eddie gives her a puckish grin. ‘You were right,’ he says. ‘He did become a hairdresser and I had a fling with him.’

It seems Sophie’s Fairy Godmother has made just a slight error of judgement. It doesn’t matter how perfectly the glass slipper slides on to her tiny foot…Prince Charming isn’t looking for a princess.

Enigma and Rose, Margie and Laura are having a meeting at Rose’s house to decide what to do about the Alice and Jack business, now that Rose has ‘gone public’. Ever since they issued their media release the phone has been ringing endlessly. Margie has organised for the Alice and Jack business to give a very big donation to some charity group (an overly generous one, Enigma thinks, but she is keeping her mouth shut) as a ‘public apology’. Margie also has some idea about offering the Alice and Jack house as a free place to stay for families with sick children, or mothers suffering from postnatal depression, which everybody is excited about, and although it’s awful to think of the house being changed after all this time, Enigma quite likes the idea of having nice, grateful people staying there. It gives her a pleasant, kind-hearted feeling.

Tags: Liane Moriarty Suspense
Source: readsnovelonline.net