Page 16 of People Skills

I WAKE UP to the sound of knocking. It’s Saturday morning. Early. Or early for me.

For a moment I think I imagined the knocking, but it’s started again. Dear god, please don’t let it be Hillary. No. She would never come to my house unannounced. She would never come here, period. She maintains that boundary because we both know it would be incredibly awkward for her to stand in my tiny little lounge room with my books and my clutter, the slightly grubby rug she’ll try not to notice under her feet and my precious things that will look like junk to her discerning, minimalist eye.

I get up and pull on my dressing-gown and I open the door, expecting a delivery driver.

Xavier is standing there, with his two suitcases. He’s wearing jeans and a grey henley, and he is holding two coffees from the Good Spot.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Shit. You were asleep,’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry. I assumed you’d be the kind of person who’s up early.’

This is not an entirely inaccurate assessment of me. Hillary thinks I’m an early riser because I get to the office before her on weekdays and I work hard at cultivating an early-riser personality. But it’s not my true personality. My true personality is starting at movie at 10 pm, it’s reading a book way past midnight, it’s saying just one more episode, it’s mindlessly scrolling late into the night while lying in my bed wrapped in blankets like a happy little worm and then sleeping in on weekends.

‘I worked late last night,’ I say, frowning. I feel disarmed, vulnerable in my dressing-gown, my hair in a knobby little bun, pillow marks probably on my face.

‘Right. Sorry.’

He clears his throat.

I say nothing. I think I can guess what he’s doing here. The suitcases are a giveaway. But I’m not going to make this easy for him. I spent an hour in bed last night rehashing the embarrassment of asking him to live with me and convincing myself that it would have been an absolutely godawful idea.

‘So. I. Ah. I was wondering if the offer of short-term accommodation was still there?’ he finally says. He looks at me sheepishly, hopefully.

‘No other offers materialised?’ I reply. Let him grovel and feel as stupid as he made me feel last night.

‘As it turns out, no.’

The Charlotte that made the impulsive offer to him feels far away now, in the light of day, with Grady and the adrenaline of the event gone. I successfully avoided Grady for the rest of the night, and Hillary seemed normal when we interacted. Maybe. It’s hard to tell with her. She could be waiting for Monday morning to ask me about everything she’s learned. It could still be helpful to have Xavier as my insurance policy, but at what cost? My privacy, my joy, my ability to come home and put on my favourite oversized T-shirt with no bra.

‘You really don’t want to stay with Hillary?’ I say. Her house is a lot nicer and always stocked with fancy food. Anytime I have opened her fridge, I have seen grapes and strawberries, whether they are in season or not. Her olive oil is infused with truffles. She has a cleaner.

‘I don’t.’ He pauses. ‘I think you can guess why. You witnessed the fight yesterday afternoon.’

‘She’s just worried.’ It is my duty to defend Hillary, as an employee and as a woman.

‘I found her trying to hack my laptop this morning.’

I snort, both at the thought of Hillary trying to hack anything—she needs me to remind her of her own password every second day—and also at the audaciousness of her trying to. She once told us she’d read her daughter’s diary when Ettie was a teenager. ‘I had to,’ she explained, ‘she’d fallen in with a bad crowd.’ ‘And what did you find?’ Kat had asked. ‘I found a lot of awful things about me,’ Hillary said. ‘It was very confronting. The mind of a fourteen-year-old girl is a cruel place.’

The fact that Hillary had this happen and still goes digging into her children’s private affairs, would not hesitate to pick up their diary as an adult, tells you everything you need to know about her. Getting the story eclipses everything else. She wants to know. She catches a scent and starts digging.

‘What was she looking for?’ I ask Xavier.

‘She said she just wanted to see if I was writing anything. I got mad at her, she got mad at me, I left. And now I’m here. With coffee. Begging.’ He raises his eyebrows hopefully.

I mean, he’s hardly begging. I get the sense this man has never begged for anything in his life. But I step aside.

‘Come in,’ I say. ‘You should probably see the house before you decide to stay.’

I lead him into the lounge room. I can see him looking around, taking it in. The small room, the bookshelves filled with books and trinkets and also a dumping ground for my keys, mail, pens and half-filled glasses of water, the velvet couch that needs its springs fixed but is my pride and joy, the Ikea armchair, an old jar holding several pink zinnias I picked from the garden sitting on the small dining table. I try to see it all through his eyes. Why do I have a half-built Lego Tudor castle on my coffee table? Well, I thought I might get into Lego as a hobby but then I decided it was too tedious.

‘I like it,’ he says.

‘You haven’t seen the kitchen yet,’ I say leading him past the dining table and around the corner to the kitchen. I realise too late that I have photos tacked on my fridge, silly Polaroids from parties mostly, relics from my old life, and a bunch of new ones I’ve taken of flowers in the garden, which suddenly looks sad, like I have replaced friends with plants. I also have a small whiteboard with several reminders for myself. I subtly wipe the words buy tampons!!! off the reminder list with my finger as I walk by, the exclamation marks too revealing and urgent. He does not need to know the intricate details of my womb and my failure to be prepared.