Love and Punishment Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Love & Punishment

  ‘A fast-moving, funny, poignant novel about love, loss, revenge and punishment.’—Herald Sun

  ‘. . . well worth picking up . . . whatever effect it has on you, it can’t fail to make you laugh.’—Good Reading

  ‘A quirky, painfully honest yet hysterically funny account of one woman’s journey towards relationship closure.’—New Idea

  ‘. . . her timing is impeccable.’—Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘A fast, poignant and funny novel about life, love and a shiny, sharp pair of scissors from Australia’s favourite comedienne, Wendy Harmer.’—Western Advocate

  ‘Love & Punishment is easy-going chick-lit of the superior kind.’

  —Sunday Magazine

  ‘Fun rules here, and in the Hollywood ending, so does the fairytale.’—Sunday Telegraph

  ‘. . . a welcome addition to the growing list of chick-lit with an Australian accent.’—Bookseller & Publisher

  WENDY HARMER is Australia’s best-known comedienne. She is a mother of two, veteran of countless international comedy festivals and hosted 2DayFM’s top-rating Breakfast Show for 11 years. Wendy is also the author of three books for adults, including the best-selling Farewell My Ovaries (Allen & Unwin 2005) and Love and Punishment (Allen & Unwin 2006) as well as two plays, a series of children’s book about Pearlie, an urban park fairy, and the libretto for Lake Lost, a production by Baz Luhrmann for Opera Australia. Wendy has hosted, written and appeared in a wide variety of TV shows including ABC’s The Big Gig and In Harmer’s Way. She has also hosted the Nine Network television Logies and has been a regular newspaper and magazine contributor, writing columns for Australian Women’s Weekly and the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine. Wendy is currently working on her new television series STUFF which will be broadcast on ABC national television in early 2008.

  Love & Punishment

  Wendy Harmer

  Lyrics on p. 17 are from ‘Without You’ words and music by Peter Ham and Thomas Evans © Apple Music Ltd. admin. by Essex Music Australia Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted with permission; p. 68 ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ by Kris Kristofferson © 1969 Combine Music Corp. For Australia and New Zealand: EMI Songs Australia Pty Limited (ABN 85 000 063 267) PO Box 35, Pyrmont, NSW 2009, Australia. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  This edition published in 2008

  First published in 2006

  Copyright © Wendy Harmer 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Harmer, Wendy.

  Love and punishment.

  ISBN 978 1 74175 174 1 (pbk.).

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Set in 11.5/18 pt Sabon by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Dale, Michael, Paul, Bruce, Louis,

  Amanda and Tennyson Street

  One

  ‘Now, Francie, I want you to look in this mirror and tell me what you love about yourself. I want you to think of all the good qualities you have and all your talents. Tell me why you love you.’

  Francie took the hand mirror and looked into it long and hard. She saw the blonde streaked hair with its track of dirty brown roots, the dull grey eyes and puffy eyelids rimmed with red, the trail of watery snot and the flaked, dry lips. It was not, as they say, a good look.

  I hate you. You are an utter loser. A fat lump of nothing. Give up. Go home. Disappear from the face of the earth, evaporate into thin air. Just do everyone a favour and fucking die. You will not be missed . . . by anyone . . . ever.

  Francie dropped the mirror into her lap and reached for the box of tissues. She howled again and this time the sobs were so deep and resonant it seemed as if they echoed off the sides of a bottomless, dark canyon where her heart should have been.

  ‘OK then, we’ve obviously got a bit of work to do,’ said Faith brightly.

  A bit of work? Now there was an understatement, thought Francie grimly. This was more of a demolition job. Knock me down and start again. The foundations are rotten to the core and the house built on top should be condemned. Call tenders. Back up the trucks. Bring in the wrecking ball.

  Faith leaned forward and brushed a strand of hair from Francie’s damp forehead. ‘I think we have some issues here. Fear of abandonment, co-dependence, lack of self-love . . .’

  ‘No, no . . .’ Francie snivelled. She looked up from her lap and into Faith’s kind cow eyes. ‘You just don’t get it! It’s not that I don’t love me. It’s that Nick doesn’t love me!

  ‘And as for “a fear of abandonment”? It’s not a fear. It actually happened!

  ‘And all this co-dependence crap? Of course I depended on him! If I hadn’t depended on him you’d be telling me I had “commitment problems”.’

  ‘You’re very smart, Francie.’ Faith sat back in her red velvet thinking chair and twiddled the row of amethyst rings on her plump fingers.

  Too bloody smart for you.

  ‘But you have to ask yourself, if you are so smart, why are you sitting here tonight and paying money for my advice?’

  And that, Francie had to admit, was a very, very good question. In fact, there was a simple reason why Francis Sheila McKenzie was sitting in the blue velvet confession chair in the front room of Faith and John-Pierre Treloar, Relationship Counsellors. Francie’s friends had all told her that if she didn’t get professional help they would hire a hit man to kill her.

  ‘You have to reach out, Francie. Dip into that well of friendship and love that’s there for you when times are tough,’ someone had said when Francie finally crept from her bed blinking into the sun like a half-blind opossum emerging from its mother’s pouch.

  So she’d done that. She’d dipped and dipped and dipped again, until now the well was almost dry and she was scraping through the muddy residue of goodwill with her bare hands. Now even her own mother was screening Francie’s telephone calls. No-one could bear to hear the story again. Of how six months ago her lover of five years, Nick Jamieson, had dumped . . . Dumped? Was that a good enough word? How about betrayed, rejected, discarded, abandoned, dismissed, unloaded, jettisoned, disposed of, dispensed with? Let’s just say he had left Francie for another woman.

  And here was the clincher. This ‘other woman’ was OLDER than Francie. Eleven years older. What an absolute joke! There were any amount of witty and bitchy remarks to be made if she had been eleven years YOUNGER than Francie. Francie knew them all. She’d rehearsed them in her head.

  ‘He’s a child, Francie. You were always too grown up for him emotionally.’

  ‘It’s all about his dick. It’s physical. It’s gotta be. It’ll wear off.’

  ‘Men . . . they
just don’t want the intellectual challenge of women their own age!’

  If Nick had run off with a twenty-one year old, Francie would have been automatically declared the winner. But this woman was forty-three! Middle-aged! That made her fourteen years older than Nick! Almost a decade and a half older! This left Francie with the obvious conclusion that it was her everyone was making witty and bitchy remarks about. She was the one who was emotionally stunted, intellectually challenged and bad in bed.

  Every way Francie looked at it, she was the loser. And if you wanted icing on this monstrous, towering, ten-tiered loser cake, here it was: this other woman was also FAMOUS! Famous in the worst way possible—she had the enduring respect of her peers and the general public. Her name was a byword for credibility and integrity throughout the land. It was enough to push you right over the edge.

  Poppy Sommerville-Smith was an actress, Daahling! Not one of those television or cinema lightweights—though of course she’d taken the odd character role in a dramatic mini-series or art-house movie—but a real stage actress. A ‘marvellously gifted, intelligent, intuitive’ actress. Shakespeare, Molière, Brecht . . . all that.

  When you saw her fine-boned face on a theatrical poster—the luminous dark eyes and the gracious, cultivated curve of her mouth—you just knew the show would be an eagerly anticipated, first-rate, landmark production!

  And then she was billed with Francie’s leading man. Nick and Poppy (Francie couldn’t say their names in the same sentence)! Nick and this rat-faced, predatory, dried-up, desiccated old hag, had met during a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull by the Melbourne Theatre Company. The play should have been called The Pterodactyl as far as Francie was concerned. And the bitter irony of it was that in the play they had taken the roles of Madame Arcadina and Konstantin. Mother and son! And what charming little incestuous tableaux had been played out backstage in their adjoining dressing rooms?

  If Ms Sommerville-Smith had merely been prettier than Francie, she could have handled it. If all it had taken was hairdressing, dieting, teeth-whitening or yoga at some luxury spa, Francie could have done that. But there was no luxury spa where one could go to become gifted, intelligent and intuitive.

  If it had taken some kind of cosmetic procedure like having Botox or collagen or silicone injected or implanted, Francie could have done that too. But unfortunately, Francie felt what she needed wasn’t some bovine extract or fish toxin or man-made substance. It couldn’t be bought in a glass vial. It was charisma! That certain something, X-factor, star quality which Francie didn’t have and felt she would never, ever acquire as long as she lived.

  Not that Francie didn’t have her own creative talents as a cook, home decorator and writer. And not that Francie was unattractive. She was actually very nice looking. Her face was a perfect oval and her features were absolutely symmetrical. Dove grey eyes were expertly placed on either side of a nose which was just the right size. Her top and bottom lips were balanced in an almost mathematical equation and her mouth was in exact proportion to the rest of her face. Her skin was a nicely chosen fair shade and even her freckles seemed to have been art-directed to smatter over the bridge of her nose in a pleasing arrangement. She was of regular height and shape.

  In fact, if you were a child drawing a pretty lady, this is how you would have made her, right down to the fair hair flicking up at her shoulders. And that’s how Francie thought of herself—as a line drawing on a piece of paper. Neatly coloured in. She was unfinished, insubstantial. She was a cartoon compared with the prize-winning portrait of Poppy Sommerville-Smith. And in the end she had been screwed up and thrown in the bin. She was not being hard on herself, she reasoned, just realistic.

  How had this happened? Where? Why? When? Nick had said over and over that nothing had happened. Well, not until his relationship with Francie was over. And when was that? Er . . . that was a bit tricky to pin down . . . Exactly.

  ‘It didn’t go past a few kisses,’ Nick confessed after one particularly acrimonious session with Francie. ‘We mostly just sat and talked about what to do about our problem.’

  Our Problem? This, of course, had been Francie. And how does a woman you have slept with for five years, who wants to have kids with you, who has helped support you financially and adores the ground you walk on, end up being a problem?

  And how does this same woman end up being our problem? Meaning a problem shared with someone you’ve only known for three months and, apparently, have only kissed? And why didn’t Francie see any of this coming? None of it made any sense. So, that’s why Francie was sitting here tonight in the blue velvet confession chair in front of Faith Treloar. She was looking for answers and was prepared to pay good money to find them.

  Faith kept on quietly handing Francie tissues as she sat and sobbed. When at last she came up for air Faith spoke calmly with a reassuring hand on Francie’s knee: ‘Let me tell you what we are going to do here in this room together. We are going to do some, what we like to call, grief-work. We are going to understand your loss, resolve it and move on. How does that sound?’

  Impossible. That’s how it sounded. Faith searched Francie’s face for signs of acceptance or a shred of courage. There were none.

  ‘Do you think there’s any chance he’ll come back?’ she whispered.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Faith. ‘I think you have to face it. He’s gone.’

  Francie had such a broken, sad, hopeless look about her that, honestly, if she was an animal you would have taken a shotgun and put her out of her misery. And at that very moment Francie would have thought you were doing her a favour by blowing off her head.

  Two

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Help!

  Dear Francie,

  My boyfriend Steve and I broke up last year. We have already had ‘one last bonk’. Now he wants another one. Can you have more than one? How many can you have before you’re actually back together again?

  Jennyk

  Of course, Francie was exactly the wrong person to be asking for advice on this question. She really wasn’t a well woman. But it so happened that her Seriously Single column in the Sunday Press liftout section, P.S., was one of the most popular features of Melbourne’s top-selling weekend newspaper.

  After the break-up, Francie had taken three days off when she lost the ability to stand upright. But then she’d had to come back to work. In most cases going back to work and ‘keeping your mind busy’ would be a good thing. Especially if you worked handing out tickets to lovers illegally parked, or maybe in the tax department. Or in an abattoir. But Francie’s job meant that every day she sat in the office wading through dozens of emails from battered and bewildered ex lovers from all over the country. This should have made her feel that she was not alone. Instead it made her feel as if she was yet another victim of a nationwide epidemic of despair.

  It would be fair to ask how someone who was thirty-two years old was still writing a column for a liftout in a Sunday newspaper. But that would be making the assumption that every journalist had ambitions to be a foreign correspondent or the editor of a prestigious magazine. Francie didn’t. She’d seen enough award-winning journalists up close to know it wasn’t what she wanted. She’d seen them at election time staggering into the office late at night dragging suitbags and laptops. Watched as their faces pitched forward in despair when they saw their cubicles had sprouted a dense foliage of urgent yellow Post-it notes in their absence.

  She’d heard them arguing over the phone about why they couldn’t leave the office to pick up the kids from day care, take the car in for a service or make it to the restaurant before dessert. ‘Just start without me,’ was a phrase she had heard her colleagues say so often that she wondered how they’d managed to have kids in the first place. She vowed never, ever to utter these words herself. She would always be there, on time, for her own life.

  Francie had had her chances to fly. She’d even left the Daily Press
for two years to take up a position as a feature writer on a new lifestyle magazine. For a year she’d produced not much more than bright, enthusiastic paragraphs about scatter cushions, scented candles and designer appliances. She’d helped out with photo shoots of perfect interiors in some of the nation’s finest homes. She’d fetched and carried teapots, trivets and trinkets to be artfully placed by perfectly polished stylists. Francie felt as if she was a chipped earthenware plate on a table set with fine bone china.

  After twenty editions of Here and Now it was suddenly been and gone, and she had absolutely nothing to show for it except one hundred and fifty free cookbooks and a vanity unit crammed with sample-sized jars of body lotion and sea salt scrubs. Oh . . . and there had been an eighteen-month relationship with a carpenter from an infotainment television show. She suspected he’d used the same excuses with her that he used with his clients: ‘I’ll be there next Tuesday, if it isn’t raining.’

  In the end he’d left her for the skinny whippet blonde who presented the wall-stencilling segment. They’d published a best-selling book of handmade children’s furniture featuring recycled wood and decorative bio-paint finishes.

  Francie was glad to get a job back at the Press. The Sunday Press to be exact. She was ‘a good little writer with a lively turn of phrase’ according to the managing editor. While she wasn’t going to the parliamentary press gallery any time soon, that was fine too. She hadn’t realised how much she’d missed the atmosphere of a newspaper office, where the thunderclouds of breaking news rolled over the vast open plain of desks and cliff faces of glass. Francie watched with endless fascination as journalists, editors and subeditors were stirred to frenzied activity by the approaching storm fronts of world events.