Click, click, click.
John was my one true friend. I didn’t want to ruin that. Neither did he. We’d talked about it and decided it was too weird. John’s theory was that my one true love had been brutally murdered in a past life and I was waiting for him to come back to me. Admittedly, he came up with that when completely wankered from a bottle of wine. John was usually a hard liquor man, but that night it was all we had on hand after finishing a photo shoot in Broome at three a.m.
“Dalton doesn’t fit the profile,” he’d slurred, pointing his finger at me with a hand that held both his wine glass and a cigarette.
“What profile?” I slurred back.
“The profile of your gladiator.” John hiccupped. “The warrior who’s fought through the centuries to find his way back to you. You’ve just gotta lose the cold armour, Grace,” he informed me, his closet romantic side escaping with every sip he took. “He won’t be able to bust down your castle walls if you don’t. Dalton’s too weak. You need someone who’s going to push your buttons, and not just the ones in your panties.” He offered a meaningful look towards my lady parts as well as waving his hand in the same direction in case I didn’t get the reference.
He was right about the cold armour. It never used to be there, but life had a way of changing you into someone you never imagined you’d be, and giving you a life that you’d never really wanted.
I came from a big family. Two loving parents, an older brother, Henry, and two younger twin sisters, Emma and Ava. Henry was lead guitarist in the band, Jamieson. I always knew he’d be famous one day. He’d been attached to that guitar from birth. Emma and Ava were fraternal, but similar, sort of like peas and corn. They’d decided at an early age to join the Air Force. Our house subsequently became fluent in Top Gun. For an entire year, they wouldn’t answer to anything other than Iceman and Goose. And me? Every day was different. One day I wanted to be an Olympic trampolinist, the next a heavy haulage trucker. Only one thing remained constant: I was the sister that caused trouble. We were allowed ice cream if we ate all our vegetables, and I was always the one that fed them to the dog and said I ate them. When we went to the shops, I was the one screaming and causing a scene for the chocolate so craftily displayed at the supermarket checkout. I was the one that begged for a skateboard and broke my arm when I tackled the biggest hill in our housing estate. I was the one that wouldn’t go to sleep at night without demanding at least five stories and a glass of water.
You probably get the point, but nothing fazed my mum, not even me. She was the person you could just look at and know she was someone who loved life. She radiated it from every golden pore, like some goddamn beacon that was too beautiful for words. My father worshipped at her angelic feet, but when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, everything changed, including me, and when she died four years later, everything inside my dad died too.
He’d spent years doing everything to prolong her life: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, tonics and healthy eating. It was horrific, because at such a young age, even I could see there was nothing left of her. Watching someone so bright and vital fade into nothingness was unbearable; it was harder than saying goodbye.
Two months later at the age fourteen, I stumbled on a foreclosure notice from the bank. We were losing our house. Employing my best snooping skills—because I was the child that always found where the Christmas presents were hidden—I found out just how bad it was, and my heart broke for my father. We were left with medical bills so big they might as well have been Mount Everest. In that one horrifying moment, I saw Henry giving up his guitar, feeling obligated to work some boring, dead-end job to help support our family. I saw Emma and Ava’s dream of the Air Force turn into working the check-in counter at Sydney’s international airport. So when some random stranger at the local coffee shop took in my gangly, awkward frame and told me I could be earning big dollars on international catwalks and “hey, here’s my card, call me,” I didn’t laugh in his face. I clutched that card like I was adrift in The Perfect Storm and it was my goddamn life raft.
I’d been working nonstop ever since, most of the time away from home with a tutor to help me finish high school. And while the money I made had paid the bills a thousand times over, the price I paid was horrendous. I didn’t know my family anymore. We weren’t close. I’d lost them at the same time I’d lost my mum. Henry, Emma, and Ava were out there living their dreams while I was stuck in a life I’d never wanted.