#5: later on
Eventually the afternoon rush passed – full, as always, of primary-aged children wandering through on their way home from school, pulling all the Treehouse and Alice-Miranda books off the shelves and replacing them in the wrong spots. By the time many of the shops on Carr Street began to shutter for the day, it was clear Jon Sutcliffe was not going to grace Sabine and Trixie with his presence.
Sabine had rushed frantically around all afternoon, attempting to keep everything sight-perfect for Jon’s arrival. As the sun sank behind the cracked cottages on Belair Street, she huffed and grumbled between Junior Fiction and True Crime, reshelving the afternoon’s sold items and sending quiet curses out at their “imbécile” boss. She and Trixie had spent most of the day drinking far too much coffee, and for Sabine the indulgence was working its way out in one of the foulest moods Trixie had ever experienced in her drama-prone friend.
For Trixie, the coffee was sitting like a rock in her stomach, pumping out toxic claps of energy which shook her from her eyelids all the way down to her toes. She felt queasy, and there was a pulse thrump-ing over one eyebrow, but there were still fifteen minutes left to trudge through before they could finally close. So Trixie was putting in calls to all their customers with orders waiting for pick-up – trying her best to call only when Sabine was farthest from the front counter, lest she record voicemails with a background of French swear words.
“Good evening, Rita,” Trixie sang into the receiver, as Sabine slumped down at the shelves in Children’s Picture Books. “This is Trixie at the Carr St Bookshop.”
The bell over the front door rang: one last customer sneaking in before they closed for the day. Trixie turned and hunched away from the front of the shop. Sabine preferred to handle the end-of-day customers, because she complained that Trixie took too long trying to upsell them, which kept them all back after hours. “We have your copy of Nine Perfect Strangers in at the counter,” Trixie continued into the phone. “Feel free to come collect it whenever you’re ready.” She paused for a second, feeling awkward, as she always did, leaving a voice message when people never checked them anymore. “So, ah, have a great night!”
“A fellow Liane fan.” Natalie’s voice was deeper now, and less strained. But Trixie recognised her immediately, and smiled down at the shop phone, which she was still clasping in her hands. She could see her cheeks colouring through her mirror image in the blank screen.
“Back to exploit the facilities?” Trixie teased, turning around to meet Natalie’s cool, crinkling eyes. “Because I’m afraid Sabine locked up the back about fifteen minutes ago.”
“No, no,” Natalie chuckled. “This time I’m all alone. See?” She held up both her hands, which were free from any toddler’s embrace. “No entourage.”
“I see.” Trixie dipped her head, giving Natalie what she hoped was a shrewd, clued-in look. “Well then, what can I help you with . . .?”
“Natalie.” Natalie put her slim hand up to her chest as she repeated her name, though Trixie had memorised it from their morning meeting.
She was no longer in exercise gear; now she was dressed in a neat, blue-and-white striped shirt and a pair of pale baggy jeans with rips in the right knee. Her red hair was piled in a knot atop her head, and the last stripes of the setting sun caught it through the shop window, glinting cheekily at Trixie. She still had an air of exhaustion about her, but there was also a lightness in the way she was grinning at Trixie that had been missing earlier.
“Right. Natalie. Of course.” Trixie smiled, then pointed to herself. “Trixie.”
“I remember,” Natalie said.
Sabine stomped past them, pulling on her jacket. She was emptying a cigarette from a crumpled packet and shaking her head. “Gens fou!” she muttered, just loud enough for Trixie to hear.
Loud enough for Natalie to hear as well, for she grinned at Trixie, raising a pale, freckled eyebrow. “I just wanted to thank you, again, for being so kind to us this morning.”
“Oh, look,” Trixie mumbled, “you don’t need to. It’s not a big deal.”
“No, it is. To me, it is.” Natalie was suddenly serious. “It’s been really – it’s actually been pretty hard, moving over here. For Olly and me. We’re by ourselves most of the time, except for this old lass in the unit behind us who watches him in the evenings sometimes. And people can be . . . people don’t like kids much, I reckon. Or, I don’t know. Anyway, not a lot of people begging to help out a hopeless single mum and her germy two-year-old.”
“Ah,” Trixie said. “That’s – yeah, that sucks.”
Natalie’s eyes were wide with grief, and a little distant. “I don’t really know who to ask for help most of the time anyway,” she went on. “None of my friends even talk to me anymore. They hate Olly. Or, I don’t know, they just don’t care about him?”
She looked back at Trixie, who felt embarrassed as she spotted tears pricking the corners of Natalie’s bright eyes. “Sorry, you don’t care about this, obviously. You’re just a nice girl doing her job.”
Natalie turned to leave, brushing roughly at her face, which was pinched with humiliation.
“Hey!” Trixie called after her. “Hey. Come on, now.”
Trixie vaulted the shop counter with ease – hours of practicing when she was alone on quiet weekday shifts had made her something of a bookshop gymnast – and caught Natalie as she reached the front door. As she rested a hand on Natalie’s broad, surprisingly muscular shoulder, her heart tripped.
“If you walk out of here in tears, we’ll get a bad reputation,” Trixie scolded, and Natalie gave her a watery smile. “Come and sit down, I think I’ve still got a bottle of terrible chardonnay left over from Thursday book club.”
It wasn’t until well after nightfall, the string lights hanging hung under the awnings on Carr Street just lighting the windows, that Trixie realised it was well past closing. And yet, she and Natalie were still sitting together, chatting quietly and sipping warm white wine from coffee mugs: Trixie perched on the counter, her legs dangling down close to Natalie’s knees, which were squashed up against her stomach as she balanced on a rickety old bar stool. Sabine had never re-emerged from her closing-time smoko in the back courtyard. Trixie guessed she must have left via the side gate, possibly still in a huff.
The wine was dreadful, and the shop was cold and shadowy without the sun in the windows. Still, no matter how many times Trixie checked on Natalie, she seemed determined to stay there, drinking the bad wine and knocking her knees against Trixie’s shins. It turned out Natalie was, like Trixie, newly single. She had left a large house and a bad-tempered partner, Steve, on the south side, for a cramped but safe apartment in Kensington – one that, in her words, was “all hers, at last”.
Though everything was much harder alone – and Natalie was really, truly alone, as her family farmed sugar cane up past Cairns, and all their friends in Elsternwick had sided with Steve in the split – Natalie preferred it to the constant tension of life with her ex. “He didn’t – he never – I just couldn’t stay there,” she told Trixie, chewing on the lip of her mug and looking distant again.
“Of course,” Trixie agreed, and though she wished she could ask Natalie more, she knew she mustn’t. But Natalie could talk at length about Olly, who was just recently two years old and appeared to be Natalie’s primary reason for motoring along. She unloaded a raft of toddler stories on Trixie, beaming each time she mentioned his name. And, though Trixie had never been much of a kid person herself, she made sure to laugh and gasp in all the right places.
“You’re being very kind to a silly, doting mum,” Natalie observed, at the end of a story about Olly’s recent antics in the local GP’s office.
“He seems like a gem,” Trixie said, and Natalie beamed again.
“He really is,” she sighed. “But then I guess every mother would say that.”
Trixie laughed. “Probably.”
“I should stop telling you baby stories.”
“Well,” Trixie said, reaching out to retrieve Natalie’s empty mug, “I’d just like to hear more about you. I’m sure there’s lots you haven’t told me about yourself.”
Natalie waved a hand at Trixie. “Oh I’m boring. I’m just a boring old mum now.”
“You’re hardly old,” Trixie said, and as she did, she realised it was absolutely impossible to tell exactly how old Natalie was. Her lean, fit body appeared to belong to a young woman (or athlete, for Trixie couldn’t imagine anyone else getting that kind of definition on their arms); but the crinkles around her eyes and mouth were perhaps the signs of graceful ageing.
“That’s kind, coming from a – how old are you?” Natalie asked, covering her eyes in mock-despair.
“Excuse me,” Trixie huffed, “I’m 28.”
“Oh, god!” Natalie threw her head back, laughing. “You’re not even thirty.”
“And how old are you?” Trixie asked bluntly. “Eighty-six?”
“Very funny.” Natalie frowned at Trixie. “Women my age know better than to tell someone much younger and far more beautiful just how old and shrivelled we are.”
“Please,” Trixie rolled her eyes. “You’re gorgeous.”
Natalie blushed deeply. It spread right up from her neck to her high, full cheeks, flushing out her freckles. “Well,” she said softly, “thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
The two women sat in silence for a moment, avoiding each other’s gaze. Trixie felt her heart was beating so fast that Natalie must be able to hear it. And she knew, if she were to reach up and touch her own face, it’d be as flushed and pink as Natalie’s was.
“I mean, it’s true,” Trixie went on. “You’re very attractive, Natalie. It’s just the truth.”
Natalie finally looked back up at Trixie, fixing her with what was, by now, a very familiar clear-eyed gaze. “Thank you, Trixie.”
“Anyway,” Trixie said, spinning herself on the counter and hopping down in the main shop area. “You know you’re gorgeous!”
As Trixie marched toward the Fiction section, she heard Natalie chuckling behind her. Trixie reached the shelves and began scanning for ‘K’ authors. Behind her, she heard Natalie hop off the chair. “K . . . Kay. Kellerman. Kerouac.”
Natalie shuffled in beside Trixie, who was on her tippy-toes, searching. Trixie felt the heat of Natalie’s arm prickling beside her own, warming her a little in the icy shop. “Umm – ahhhh – Keats. Kelly.”
Now Trixie was certain Natalie could hear her frantic heartbeats, for they were jumping out of her chest and up into her throat, knocking against her larynx as if determined to publicly humiliate her. But then, Natalie was breathing very fast as well, faster than she had been earlier, when they were sitting up at the counter together. Her breaths were quick and shallow, as though she’d just run a huge distance, perhaps scaled a steep peak or two – not wandered from one side of the shop to the other.
Trixie shook her head slightly and focused back on her search. She found the book she was looking for and plucked it from between its snug shelf-mates. “I thought you might like this,” she said, handing the book to Natalie. “Just, since you’re a fan of Liane Moriarty.”
“I’ve heard of her,” Natalie said, peering down at the cover with an air of scepticism. “Is this a romance?”
Trixie squinted Natalie, pressing the thick copy of This Charming Man into her reluctant hands. “Kind of,” she said. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Okay,” Natalie replied. “If you say I’ll like it.”
“I think you might like it. OK? I’m not a book magician. It’s actually a little rough going in parts but . . . I just think you might get – you might find it a decent read.”
Natalie shrugged and accepted the book. Then she reached into her pocket for some cash.
“No! No. My shout. Please.”
Natalie’s sandy eyebrow shot up. “You sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Trixie walked Natalie, cradling her copy of Marian Keyes’ best-ever novel, to the front door of the shop. She leaned past Natalie to fiddle with the tricky door, which had warped a little in the cold, and wrenched it open. Above them, the shop bell rang, and they both glanced up at it.
“I hope you enjoy it,” Trixie said, nodding at the book in Natalie’s arms.
All at once, Natalie darted forward, a look of great determination in her eyes, and pressed her lips against Trixie’s. On the outside, Trixie froze; but inside, her heart was a box of fireworks with a match to it, exploding against her chest, the impact rippling right through her. Natalie’s face was right against Trixie’s, so close she could’ve counted the freckles on Natalie’s cheeks. She tasted like white wine and vanilla lip balm, and though her lips were a little rough and dry, they were also impossibly soft. Strangely so. Trixie closed her eyes, and she felt rather than directed her hands to reach up and clasp Natalie’s face, her flushed cheeks.
As quickly as Natalie had leant in to kiss her, it was over. She pulled away and slipped under Trixie’s arm, out through the front door of the shop. She was blushing deeply, her eyes over-bright. She waved at Trixie, then turned and bolted down the street, all while Trixie (still somewhat dumbfounded) stared blankly out the door after her.
The Broken-Heart Brigade is released via weekly e-newsletter instalments through Substack. It is supported by Matilda’s generous subscribers, Melbourne City of Literature and City of Melbourne.
The Broken-Heart Brigade is made in Naarm (Melbourne), on stolen Wurundjeri land that was never ceded. Matilda pays respect to the rightful Aboriginal owners of the land on which she lives and works, and hopes the readers of her writing do too.