When you are heading towards 40 and people start to notice you a little bit less, what do you do with your new powers of invisibility?
Read an extract from Deborah Callaghan’s new book, Little Clothes.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Audrey Mendes is a clever lawyer but has never made partner. Her weeks are filled with long hours in the office, visits to her ageing parents, trivia nights at the local and evenings at home with her pet rabbit, Joni.
When Audrey tries to buy wine at the pub she is ignored and walks out without paying. One thing leads to another, and soon she starts rebelling in small and creative ways against a world in which she is unseen – until a painful reminder from her childhood pushes her into a reckoning.
All the while there’s a potential romance and an eccentric new neighbour to deal with. And why does Audrey buy extravagant baby clothes when she doesn’t have a child?
Wry, humorous and provocative, this is an affectionate novel about sorting out the past, grabbing onto life and claiming your place in it.
Chapter 1
Audrey Mendes caught a bus from the ferry wharf to the first strip of small shops. Candles, homewares and whatnot. She sometimes trudged up the sharp rising hill towards the western sun, past the Victorian terraces that had been renovated in the 80s when it was fashion- able to expose the porous bricks, but mostly she didn’t, and not today, although she worried she should have. She could feel the band of fat from belly to hips when she leaned forward to the cramped space behind the seat in front to stuff her jacket into her gym bag, remembering with some regret the medium pasta salad she’d eaten from a plastic tub while working through lunch. That she carried the heavy bag containing her cosmetics, little-used runners and a lightly edited novel into the city five days a week could
surely be counted as exercise.
•
At the pub she chose two bottles of white wine from the fridge and waited at the corner counter next to the long bar where people had begun to order beers and settle. The banter had started.
‘Mate, did ya see the game?’
‘Yeah mate, whatta game!’
Another game was playing at full volume on the screen in the next room. Audrey could see people in there drinking with Friday-night abandon. One of the bartenders came near and she waved. A little wave, granted. He didn’t see her. He picked up a phone from the back of the bar and started texting. He picked up a second phone and texted. He picked up a third phone and texted. It was as if he was shuffling cards, such was his sleight. And Audrey waited. She was sure that when he finished fiddling with the phones, he’d serve her. It was gloomy in the pub, she excused him, and it was hard to be seen in the small alcove to the side of the long bar. And she was short, even in her heels, and the bottle-shop cash register blocked her face. The music was loud. A young woman with crimson dreadlocks and deep dimples, also tending the bar, joked with the man who had three phones. Another bartender, sporting a bun on top of his partially shaved head and a tightly plaited beard with a tinkling bell on its point, said something and they all laughed explosively, parted and strutted. Audrey waved larger this time. No one came.
‘Hello!’ she said in a too-loud voice. ‘Hello! Can I please get some service?’
She watched others being served at the long counter. A young man was offered a tasting of craft beer, a new brand from Marrickville.
Audrey could hear the bar staff telling the slight but apparently riveting story of Manmaid, a microbrewery startup involving twin brothers Leo and Levi, an abandoned garage and a small loan that might one day lead to imagined riches. The customer screwed up his face in disgust. The beer wasn’t to his liking. It most certainly was not! He turned to his female companion and expressed his thorough disapproval by twisting his lips and sticking out his tongue stiffly. He was affronted. A second tasting of a different brand was poured to test his fine palate. The bar staff huddled, waiting on a verdict.
‘Hello!’
Audrey waved again, this time in half circles almost as wide as a small sedan windscreen. No one turned to her. Still, she waited. She was a polite person but when she had excused them for long enough Audrey became irritated. After another few minutes she put one bottle on top of the jacket in her gym bag and the other in her handbag, and started to walk out of the pub. Past the manager who some- times called her love when she smiled at him in the local supermarket. The manager who, with his wife, was raising his daughter in his place of work. He turned as Audrey left. The pudgy child was trying to press buttons on a solitary poker machine in the entry by standing on her toes and slapping her flat hand high above her head. Here we go, thought Audrey, he’s seen me.
‘See ya, love.’
She smiled tightly at the young father, who was wearing a trucker cap inside and backwards.
One block and a few houses up, Audrey put her bags down on her verandah and walked back to the street to see if she had been followed. The street was empty except for her neighbours, who were tinkering with their car, bonnet up. She had thought of them as the amiable village idiots since they had trick or treated on Halloween among the throng of neighbourhood children. Roy and his son Troy were dressed in party-shop Batman and Robin suits and she’d given them each a mini Mars bar from her generous basket of lollies. Audrey had been dressed up too. A crone in greenface.
Now she shut her front door, clomped down the hall to the kitchen, twisted the top off a bottle, poured herself a glass and kicked off the bloody high heels she wore to court when she accompanied the men to help keep track of their books, manila folders, trolleys and coffee orders.
After 20 minutes, she started to wonder if there were security cameras in the pub. She didn’t think so. The police had knocked on the door when she first bought her house. There had been a residential break and enter a few doors down, at number 83.
‘Go to the pub,’ she advised the two young uniforms. ‘They’ll have cameras there.’
‘They don’t. We checked there first.’
‘Oh, well, you’d think they would. Being a business.
Especially round here.’
‘If you hear of anything or remember any suspicious activity from the last few days, please call this number.’ They handed Audrey a card and pocketed their notebooks.
‘I will. Hope you catch them.’
They left through Audrey’s wonky gate, already alert to lifting rather than swinging it, their hips swaying under the weight of their cumbersome weaponry. Guns, baton, pepper spray, handcuffs.
Yet maybe there were cameras now installed at the pub. The new owners had taken over just five months ago, keeping the managers on but permanently removing the seafood pie from the menu. She’d have to explain her actions to the police who would knock on her door at any minute. She’d be struck off. Who would employ her now? How would she explain her behaviour to her parents, who would be disappointed in their surviving child? Their 38-year-old single daughter. The lawyer. There was no knock on the door, but she was unsettled and decided to go to the pub to buy another bottle. Perhaps take one bottle back in her handbag. She couldn’t take the already opened bottle, though she briefly considered filling it to the top with water. No. Stupid! But how to pay for three bottles when she’d only have two?
In the pub Audrey chose another bottle and put it on the counter next to the stolen bottle. She waved.
‘Hello!’
She waited. The bar was hectic now and the staff moving with purpose.
‘Hi, can I get some service please?’
Customers streamed in and stood in ragged lines at the long bar. They had all the attention.
‘Hello, can I please get some service?’
No one turned. No one glanced in Audrey’s direction. She considered taking the bottles to the bar but the sign said not to. Purchase all bottle shop items in the bottle shop. NOT in the bar. NOT was underlined three times.
‘Hello! I am now leaving and walking out with two bottles of wine,’ she yelled. ‘I’m leaving!’
And so she did. Back at home Audrey again waited for the knock on the door as she sat at the kitchen table looking at the three stolen bottles. She was discomforted and cranky. Resentful. She felt she’d been forced into an awkward position. By 9.30 she had stopped worrying and was playing Words With Friends with strangers, checking Instagram, and watching Ozark on Netflix.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Deborah Callaghan worked as an interstate train stewardess, a librarian, and freelance journalist before starting a thirty-five-year publishing career. She was a book publicist, a publisher, and a literary agent. She lives in Sydney with her husband, two daughters and three lovely dogs.
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