Food, Sex & Money Read online

  Liz Byrski was born and brought up in England and has lived in Western Australia since 1981. She is the author of a number of non-fiction books, and has worked as a staff and freelance journalist, a broadcaster with ABC Radio and an adviser to a minister in the WA Government. Liz now lectures in professional writing at Curtin University. She is also the author of Gang of Four.

  www.lizbyrski.com.au

  Also by Liz Byrski

  Gang of Four

  Liz Byrski

  FOOD, SEX

  & MONEY

  First published 2005 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  This Pan edition published in 2006 by Pan Macmillan Australia

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Reprinted 2006

  Copyright © Liz Byrski 2005

  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.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

  ISBN-13: 978 0 330 42265 9

  ISBN-10: 0 330 42265 0

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Typeset in Palatino by Post Pre-press Group

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  Author photograph: Murray Simon

  These electronic editions published in 2005 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Food, Sex & Money

  Liz Byrski

  Adobe eReader format: 978-1-74197-140-8

  Online format: 978-1-74197-743-1

  EPUB format: 978-1-74262-513-3

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  Contents

  COVER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY LIZ BYRSKI

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sheila and Don Drummond gave me the best ever crash course on Melbourne and its suburbs, driving me everywhere, feeding me, and making me welcome and extremely comfortable in gorgeous, snowy Woodend.

  Lorraine Haw provided me with information on emergency treatment and other medical issues.

  The wonderful team at Pan Macmillan – Cate Paterson, Sarina Rowell and Jo Jarrah – kept me on track and comprehensible, and dealt with my work with professionalism and respect.

  My family and my women friends are a source of constant support and great inspiration.

  I thank you all.

  Thanks too to Jenny Joseph for permission to use extracts from her poem ‘Warning’, © Jenny Joseph, Selected Poems, Bloodaxe, 1992.

  Information on the Red Hat Society can be found at www.redhatsociety.com and there are several groups in Australia.

  ONE

  Once, a long time ago when she was very much younger, Bonnie had had sex for money. In fact, it wasn’t just once, it was quite a few times – but she preferred to think of it, the whole episode, as once. It wasn’t anything sordid, of course: no soliciting, no kerb-crawling punters, no cash on the dressing table of some grubby motel, nothing like that. It was more of an investment strategy, and at the time it seemed perfectly reasonable. She was young, single, a newly qualified accountant and she had grown up with money; now she wanted financial independence. He was older, married, a banker and very rich.

  ‘You should get yourself a share portfolio, Bonnie,’ he told her a few times. ‘I’d be happy to advise you.’ And he slid his hand down the side of her skirt and it settled on the curve of her rather shapely bottom and stayed there.

  Bonnie, always a realist, understood that a comparatively short-term investment of her body could be the key to a lifetime of financial security. ‘After all, it’s not as though he’s revolting,’ she told her flatmate. ‘And – well, he’ll be getting something he really wants, so I might as well get something I want. He’s not totally unfanciable; in fact, he’s quite sweet. Sex is the seed capital for my security.’

  The flatmate, who had just completed an arts degree with a double major in philosophy and ethics, rolled her eyes and suggested that Bonnie invest in some condoms.

  It proved to be a highly satisfactory joint venture. The banker deposited his seed, and Bonnie’s assets in blue-chip shares grew, until the awkward moment when even the prospect of adding a few shares in a West Australian gold mine no longer seemed sufficiently attractive and she cut out of the deal and began banking elsewhere. These days Bonnie rarely gave it a thought, unless it was to contrast her first pragmatic sexual encounters with the subsequent thirty-plus years of satisfactory monogamy with Jeff. The only two men she had ever slept with were bankers, the first for investment purposes, the second when she fell in love and married; the irony was not lost on her and doubtless some feminist therapist could come up with an interesting theory about this, but Bonnie preferred not to know. There was, she thought, a bit too much interest in finding out about oneself these days and a person could easily overload on insight.

  But that first adventure in investment did run through her mind now, as she sat at the dressing table putting on her mascara and wondering if she had dressed up too much for this reunion with her old school friends. It bounced back into her consciousness because the last time she met them she had been building that investment portfolio one night a week in a very comfortable city apartment, which was the banker’s weekday residence. Not that she’d mentioned it to Fran and Sylvia at the time, of course. They had stopped sharing all their secrets three years earlier when they graduated from
the convent. Since that day the ties of sisterhood, forged in the shadowy corners of the locker room and the bleak alcove at the back of the hockey hut, had been strained by distance and the discovery of the wider world outside.

  The mascara wand slipped and one eye suddenly acquired a Dusty Springfield look. Bonnie leaned back surveying her face from all angles and decided that she’d put on too much make-up anyway. Here in Australia her face seemed different, the features too small and neat; she’d always wished for fuller lips, and now they seemed thinner than ever. She’d considered collagen injections, and those permanent tattoos that built a firm but unobtrusive lip outline like permanent lipstick, but she feared ending up with an obtrusive pout from the former and the agonising pain that would certainly be attached to the latter.

  She peered again – perhaps it was just that her face was thinner? She had lost about five kilos since Jeff died. She began removing the make-up with a cleansing pad designed for mature skin. Less make-up seemed to be the thing here: in the three months she’d been back she’d noticed that older women seemed to favour a more natural look than European women. Bonnie didn’t want to look false, or dated; on the other hand, she didn’t want to turn up looking older than the other two. They would all turn fifty-six this year, but you just couldn’t tell with women. These days, fifty-five year olds could look like forty or seventy.

  She stared at her now half-naked face in the mirror, wishing she hadn’t organised the reunion, wishing she’d never discovered the wretched website where you could contact your old school friends. They’d left St Theresa’s convent in 1964, gone their separate ways, staying in touch but at a distance, until two years later there had been the invitation to Sylvia’s wedding. What a surprise that had been. Bonnie and Fran had been at a total loss to understand how it had happened; how confident, self-contained Sylvia, destined for a brilliant career in fashion design, had suddenly decided to marry a handsome but poverty-stricken PhD theology student whose ambition was to become a minister of religion. It hadn’t become any clearer at the wedding, when Colin, despite his good looks, appeared to be a well-meaning but tedious young man, prone to sulks and lacking in humour. A year later they had met again for a farewell drink before Fran set off for London with a backpack and not much else. And now it was thirty-seven years, almost to the day, since they had sat in the St Kilda bar where the music was too loud and some oaf spilled his beer all over Bonnie’s new blouse.

  She looked at the blouse she was wearing now, adjusting the collar, turning side-on to the mirror. She looked like a corporate wife, a corporate European wife, which was, after all, what she had been for more than thirty years. Now she was a new widow – is that how one described it? ‘Recently widowed’ sounded better – a recently widowed woman in her mid-fifties, back in Australia again, alone, displaced, confused … Bonnie stopped herself. This was not what she needed. Meeting the others again she needed to look chipper, that’s what Jeff would have said – chipper. Silly word, really, but it used to sound all right when he said it.

  Bonnie got up from the dressing-table stool and took off the Chanel suit. Even in Zurich she had sometimes thought it made too much of a statement, but it had cost a bomb so it was almost criminal to get rid of it. She dropped the skirt on the bed; maybe there was a recycling shop nearby. Something casual might be better, linen perhaps; it was surprisingly warm for April. Yes, the cream linen top and skirt would be more suitable, and very flattering. They made her look taller, stretched her out a bit; she could do with that.

  Bonnie was in good physical shape, especially since she had lost those few kilos, but she’d always battled the solid frame inherited from her father. It translated into a tendency to look chunky, and she’d become skilled at countering it with carefully chosen clothes. She stepped into the skirt, smoothing it over her hips, taking a deep breath to calm the butterflies. She was home but it felt like a foreign country. On previous trips back over the years, Jeff had been with her, but this was different: Jeff was gone and she had turned her back on the comfortable life in Switzerland, sold everything and come home to Melbourne for good. She’d thought it would feel better, that she couldn’t live on in the places they had shared, but it seemed that when Jeff died Bonnie’s confidence had died with him, and here she was, alone, feeling like a stranger – and it was very scary.

  She twisted around in front of the mirror checking her appearance. What would the other two be like now? Fran apparently had some chaotic freelance food writing work, which sounded totally in character. She had always seemed to lurch from one drama to the next, rushing everywhere at the last minute, doing more than anyone else and somehow staying cheerful about it. And Sylvia? Neat probably, neat as ever. Miss Understated, they’d called her, until they’d changed it to Miss-understood when she’d married Colin. Bonnie reapplied the mascara, very lightly this time, and then a bronze-toned lipstick; better, definitely better and, satisfied with the way she looked, she picked up her bag and ran down the stairs.

  ‘I’m off now, Mum,’ she said, popping her head around the door of the living room. ‘Lunch with Sylvia and Fran, remember?’

  Her mother looked up from the newspaper. ‘Yes, dear, I do remember, you’ve already told me where you’re going, three times at least.’

  ‘There’s some of that quiche left in the fridge …’ Bonnie began, ‘it only needs to go in the microwave.’

  Irene put down the paper and took off her glasses. ‘Bonita dear, it’s wonderful to have you home but your arrival hasn’t rendered me incapable of looking after myself. For heaven’s sake, stop fussing, enjoy your lunch and give those girls my love.’

  ‘Right then,’ said Bonnie with a weak smile, ‘right … well, I’ll go then.’

  ‘Yes, dear. You look very nice, by the way, and stop worrying; they’re your friends, not the Spanish Inquisition.’

  Fran was running late. Nothing unusual in that, but it was the last thing she needed. She had wanted time to prepare, to make sure she looked her best, and that meant getting dressed and undressed at least half a dozen times until she found something that made her look thinner. A waste of energy because nothing really made her look thinner; just sometimes she would discover the odd garment that made her look a little less fat. For the last month, in anticipation of this reunion, Fran had redoubled her efforts at the gym in the hope of doing one of those Catherine Zeta-Jones – Renée Zellweger sudden weight loss things and ending up ten kilos lighter in four weeks. She knew it was hopeless but panic compelled her. She had just completed an agonising forty minutes on the treadmill, with an incline factor of two-point-five, and an even worse fifteen minutes of torture on the cross-trainer. Fran hated the cross-trainer, and often mused that it would be nice if, at her funeral, there could be a ritual burning of the cross-trainer, which she was pretty sure would be the cause of her death.

  Still sweating and beetroot-faced from the gym, she pulled into the driveway and stopped behind a yellow VW Beetle, which meant Caro was here. That was the last thing she needed with only two hours between her and this wonderful, intriguing, terrifying reunion with her school friends. Caro was lying on the sofa talking on her mobile phone when Fran let herself in through the back door; she waved a hand and a foot in unison at her mother and mouthed a smiling ‘hello’. Fran waved, kicking off her shoes and heading for the shower.

  The last four weeks at the gym didn’t seem to have had much effect, she thought, standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror; maybe because she invariably came straight home and tucked into a huge plate of something delicious to reward herself for surviving the workout. Was it actually possible to be a food writer and not be fat? Even Nigella was comfortably rounded – voluptuous, actually, and statuesque. Of course, voluptuous and statuesque would be fine, wonderful. Podgy was not. Podgy with great hair would have been better, but Fran had been allocated very fine, silky, pale hair which defied any colour definition. Ah well, she thought, stepping into the shower, at least they’d easily recognis
e her; she’d always been podgy, now she was just older and podgy. It was what they used to call her: Podge, Podge Whittaker. ‘I may have to kill the first one of them who calls me Podge,’ she sighed, turning on the taps.

  When Fran came out, Caro was lying sprawled across her bed. ‘Wear that rust-coloured silk shirt!’ she said.

  ‘Does it make me look thinner?’ Fran asked.

  ‘Well, you’re not exactly a thin person, are you, Mum?’ Caro said. ‘But it is very flattering and it suits you. I would say it certainly makes you look younger, especially with the black linen three-quarter pants. And with those chunky black sandals – good!’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’m sure. What’re you so worried about, anyway? It’s only a couple of old school friends. They won’t care what you wear. Nobody cares what friends wear these days.’

  Fran slipped her arms into the sleeves of the shirt. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said. ‘We’re a different generation. They’ll be sizing me up, working out what my life’s been like, how I’m doing now.’

  ‘You mean you’ll be sizing them up,’ Caro said with disturbing insight. ‘No one’s as neurotic about how they look as you are, Mum, honestly.’

  Fran straightened her shoulders and buttoned up the shirt. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like,’ she said. ‘How could someone of twenty-eight, with a taut midriff and a ring in her navel, have any idea what it’s like to be fifty-five, short, and twenty kilos overweight? You know nothing, Caro, so shut up!’

  ‘Well, I won’t have a taut midriff much longer,’ Caro said, smiling and smoothing her hand across the area in question.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ Fran asked, searching now for a particular pair of gold hoop earrings. ‘What did you come for, anyway? I can’t hang around for long or I’ll be late.’