Malcolm and Juliet Page 3

  Clues

  Juliet was determined to cover every angle, turn every stone, abuse every cliché. She took to picturing her blackmailer in her head, to help focus her anger. He (well it was always men wasn’t it?) was an outcast, she’d decided. The sort of recluse with too much time on his hands, who would think to open a post office box, and take the trouble to send his letter from a central city post office (the postmark had been no help). Someone who dreamed of making money, and who wasn’t above being devious to get it. A small, malformed child with no life of his own, who had the time to go digging into the lives of other people. Probably she wasn’t his only victim. Probably he’d done this sort of thing before.

  The clearer her picture became, the easier it was to hate him, and the more she hated him, the easier it was to find the energy and ingenuity it would take to track him down. She already knew what she would do when she found him. She would cause him pain. She would beat him until his bruises were bruised, until it hurt so much his mind was distracted from the humiliation of being whipped by a girl. Then she would gently explain that if he decided to go public with his information she would report him to the police, and he would give in then, because nobody was going to risk prison for $1000. And then, if he didn’t quite look sore enough, she would beat him again.

  Juliet began by phoning the post office.

  ‘Yes, hello. Can you please tell me which post office the box number 93186 belongs to?’ she asked, in her most polite, friendly, grown-up voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, we’re not able to give out that information,’ the woman on the other end replied, in a voice that was offhand and officious and not in the least bit sorry.

  ‘That’s okay, thanks anyway.’ Juliet hung up and then rang back four more times, until a different operator answered. This time she explained she was making a purchase from a mail order company but had heard one of the firms in this industry was unreliable. Could the operator please help by confirming which branch their box number belonged to? ‘No,’ the gruff man replied. ‘That information is confidential.’

  Juliet had to ring three more times before a third voice answered. This time she told the woman that her grandfather had recently died and they had found a post box key. Could she help by telling them which branch the key belonged to? This time the operator saw fit to come out from behind the shelter of the official response, first to offer her condolences and then, after a wait of less than a minute, to inform her that the number in question was still with the former Kelburn Post Office, now the premises for the local video store. Juliet knew it well.

  ‘There, that wasn’t so difficult after all was it?’ she snarled at the no doubt surprised operator, before hanging up.

  The next morning Juliet took her packed lunch (four bananas, two cheese rolls and a 500 ml Coke), a folding canvas chair and a copy of Martial Arts Today and camped herself beneath the shade of a roadside pohutukawa tree, fifty metres down on the other side of the road from the Kelburn Video Store, with a clear view of the post boxes outside. Before settling in she crossed the road to the supermarket, bought herself a chocolate bar and checked the exact position of box 93186. Top row, two from the right.

  The plan was simple, not because she liked simple plans but because she hadn’t been able to come up with a complicated one. In the absence of inspiration she was going to rely on perseverance. She would sit there all day if she had to, all week even, if school didn’t ring home to check where she was, and she would wait. Eventually he would slime along to clear his box and when he did she would have him, his identity revealed and his plan in tatters.

  So Juliet waited and Juliet watched, all morning and a good part of the afternoon as well. Some people watched her too, just to make it fair. They stopped for a moment to stare and come up with a reason in their heads for why she might be there, before hurrying back to their lives.

  An old man stopped to tell her there was no point doing surveys, because all statistics were based on false premises and he should know because he used to teach it, before he lost his job, for reasons he preferred not to go into.

  A younger man with a most impressive mane of flame red hair asked if she was conducting an experiment, and tried to begin a conversation on the intricacies of psychology, but she was deliberately unfriendly.

  A girl a couple of years younger than herself, with her own reasons to be wagging school, stopped to ask for a cigarette, and a small child in the property to the rear hid behind the high, Beware-of-the-Dog, stained wood fence and fired his water pistol at her.

  Meanwhile people across the road came and went, some of them stopping to clear their mail boxes. All sorts of people, some in business suits, some who looked like students, and a very suspicious-looking woman with two handbags who emptied three different boxes before scurrying off with the contents hidden beneath her jersey. Nobody came for 93186 though. It remained closed and unreadable, mocking Juliet’s efforts from across the street.

  At 2.36 p.m. hunger got the better of Juliet. She needed a snack and the supermarket was just there. She hurried across the street, chose a family pack of salt and vinegar chips, fidgeted in the two person queue, forgot where she had put her $10 note, located it, waited forever for the change and rushed back out onto the pavement, almost knocking the mother of the boy with the water pistol off her feet in the process. As soon as Juliet recovered her balance she knew she had taken too long. She could sense it, well before noticing the white piece of paper, folded neatly, beckoning her from the bottom corner of box 93186. She grabbed the note and read it on the spot. She didn’t care who was watching. Him probably, from the window of some car that was about to speed away. The handwritten message was simple and to the point.

  There’s no point watching for me. I need the money.

  Nothing personal.

  But it was personal. A battle of two minds, two wills. It couldn’t be more personal. And standing there, the smug note crumpled angrily in her hand, dogs and baby strollers moving around her, Juliet knew there was little reason to feel confident of victory.

  Confidence

  It was all about confidence and Malcolm’s was on the rise. Now his ambition swelled to meet it, filling places in his imagination which he had never felt before. He had watched the footage so far and there was no denying it was rather good. The opening monologue hardly needed editing, he had found the perfect music to fade in at the end, and best of all there was the filming from the party. Brian had been perfect, even if it was unintentional, and the naked statue, complete with surreal lighting, was most surely a gift from the gods.

  Yes, life was full of good things right now, and good things is the place where great things grow. Malcolm understood this, just as he understood how important it was to exploit life’s little upswings. And so it was that Malcolm had reached his latest decision. He stood before his camera, reached for the remote, and in the familiar privacy of his small bedroom, he made his announcement.

  ‘Hi, it’s me again. Malcolm. Your researcher. I have made a decision. I am going to have a go at this sex thing myself. It seems right that I should. In fact anything less might well be considered unscientific, in the circumstances. I have always been afraid to try, in case I might be a total failure. But the more I hear, the less likely this seems. I mean to say, if someone like Brian can achieve it, apparently without too much difficulty, then really how tricky can it be? And if someone like Kevin can stand naked before the world, his exposed buttocks awash with refracted light from the disturbed dribble of a malfunctioning fountain, and emerge not in shame but instead as some sort of drunken hero, then what is there to be embarrassed about?

  ‘So there you are. Next time you hear from me I will no longer be the ivory tower academic, removed from the real-world complications of his subject matter. No, I will be amongst it, with stories of my own to tell. Teenage sex, don’t go anywhere! Malcolm is on the way over.’

  Malcolm sat down on the end of his bed. Hearing the words out loud that way made it a
ll seem so much more real and, if he was honest, a little bit of apprehension was nestling up beside his excitement. Malcolm was a details man and he knew enough to realise there were still hurdles to sidestep. For instance, a willing partner was a requirement and, as with any experiment, he would need to choose his subject carefully.

  He already had an idea. At the party there had been a girl who was hard not to look at. Charlotte was her name, and that night Malcolm had imagined the two of them alone together, and the image had lingered longer than his consciousness. He had a plan. He would ask to interview her, for the documentary. It would be a good way of raising the topic of sex. And after that, well he supposed he would just ask her outright.

  He had seen enough of the way his peers operated to understand this wasn’t the normal approach, but Malcolm had never had much time for the sloppy complications of normality. No, he was a Scientist, and Science was all about method. This was by far the most sensible, scientific way of doing things.

  Movies

  Charlotte knew it wasn’t sensible, but then the best things never were. She knew exactly what she had to do. It had come to her in a moment of clarity, of inspiration even. She spun around in her bedroom, watching the faces of the posters on the wall merge into an heroic blur. Orson, Atom, Quentin, Lars, Alfred, Robert; surely they would understand. Surely they’d all had moments just like this, when the future had reached out and offered its hand. Charlotte spun faster, and the blur became a single grey line of encouragement.

  She had never been in love before. Any number of hopefuls had stood before her and pleaded their cause but years of obsessive movie-watching had gifted her a certain jaded cynicism, and a certain hopeless romanticism too. In the movies this was no contradiction. She knew exactly why they wanted her, those sweaty boys with their cigarette breath. They wanted her because her hair was a certain colour, and her mouth formed a certain shape when she smiled, and it did a certain thing to a certain chemical balance in a certain part of their brains. But that could never do. In the movie of her life, which each day she refined inside her head, Charlotte was altogether a different kind of heroine.

  The man for her would see something more, he would understand something more. He wouldn’t need to be beautiful; Quentin’s eyes after all were far too small and Orson had always been too heavy. Her man would just have to know a few things about plot-line and composition, and the fragile tension between them. He would be the sort of man who could spend a day to frame a single perfect shot, and then work quickly in a rush of adrenalin in the few seconds before the light faded. Brooding and intense, then suddenly light as air. Unpredictable, original, an impulsive perfectionist, and above all clever. For Charlotte had been convinced of this one thing as long as she could remember: she could only ever fall in love with a genius.

  She looked into the mirror and wondered again if it wasn’t possible that at last she had met just such a man. He had arrived unannounced, right here, inside this very house, and he had come with a camera. While the others at her party had been content with drink and drugs and bad jokes told too loudly, he had settled on a greater purpose. And now she couldn’t get him out of her mind, that look of concentration on his face as he squinted at his LCD screen, the way his tongue pointed out from the corner of his mouth as he had circled the fountain, wading through water, crashing over shrubbery, brushing aside onlookers, an eye only for the perfect, naked shot.

  She hadn’t spoken to him, although it had taken all her restraint to stay away. She had to be careful. If fate had delivered him it would expect her to treat the opportunity with respect. So Charlotte had kept her distance, and quietly collected her information. His name was Malcolm, which she had no great feelings about one way or the other. He was making a documentary on teenage sex, which threw her at first. The line between creativity and deviance was a fine one. But he was known for the purity of his intellectual endeavour, people said, and it was the steady hand of a film-maker she had seen direct the lens that night, not the shaky grip of a pervert.

  Charlotte sat down and an idea came to her, while on the walls her idols looked on approvingly. She would offer herself, as a subject for his documentary. It was the perfect scene to enter on. True, she didn’t actually have a first sexual experience, but she did know exactly how she would like it to be. It was all plotted out, perfect frame by perfect frame. All she had to do was convert it from the celluloid of her imagination. Yes, that would do it. She would paint him a picture so compelling, so breathtaking, so damned sexy, that he would have no choice but to open himself up to her, invite her in to the world of his camera, and all its twisted genius.

  Charlotte took her pen and held it poised above the formidably blank sheet of paper. Then she waited for the inspiration hovering in the room to fill her.

  My first sexual experience…

  Secrets

  ‘Still on your sex thing then?’ Juliet asked. She had called in on the way home from school, the way she often did. Even in the heavy uniform her private college made her wear, designed to keep the physical form hidden from the world, she was compelling. Muscles twitched in her calves as she bounced on her toes before him, and she held her cream bun carefully between two fingers, as if afraid she might crush it.

  ‘It’s a Science thing actually,’ Malcolm reminded her.

  ‘Never said it wasn’t. So how’s it going? Did you get to Charlotte’s place? Great house eh?’

  ‘A bit tacky, I thought. There’s such a thing as too much money.’

  ‘Not in my life there isn’t,’ Juliet said, but Malcolm found it hard to take that too seriously.

  ‘It must be awful being poor,’ he joked.

  ‘Fucking desperate actually,’ Juliet told him, and the expression that slipped over her face, just for a moment, was so far from her usual Xena-like display of invincibility that Malcolm sat forward on the couch and felt an emotion he’d never before directed toward Juliet. Concern.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  Juliet sat down beside him and swallowed the last of her bun.

  ‘I need money. One thousand dollars. It’s sort of an emergency.’

  ‘So why don’t you ask your dad?’

  ‘Because then he’d find out what it was for.’

  ‘Oh.’ Malcolm knew better than to ask, but knowing isn’t everything. ‘What is it for?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he replied, although it didn’t seem fair at all. He always told her everything, didn’t he? He’d even thought about discussing his Charlotte plan with her, to get a female perspective. Now he wouldn’t, not if they were going to have secrets.

  ‘Sorry. I’d want to know too. It’s just something I have to do myself. Okay?’

  ‘I guess.’

  And the moment of disagreement slipped past, the way they always did. Malcolm had known Juliet since they were both four years old, and they’d never once had a proper argument. Some of that was fear on Malcolm’s part, but most of it was habit. Habits, the way he saw it, were sorely undervalued.

  ‘So can you help me? Where does a girl find a thousand dollars quickly?’

  ‘I could lend you a hundred and fifty. You haven’t got any?’

  ‘One hundred.’

  ‘How soon do you need it?’

  ‘A week maybe.’

  ‘We need a four hundred percent return then. That’ll be tricky.’

  ‘Come on, you’re clever. Think of something.’

  That was true, but only partly. Malcolm was more recreationally clever than gifted in a practical way, and after twenty minutes of impossible suggestions it was Juliet who finally hit on the idea.

  ‘Phone sex!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, like people ring up and pay you money, and you—’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘You must have seen the ads in the paper.’

  ‘Yes, I have actually,’ Malcolm admitted. ‘I even thought about ringing one, as part of m
y research, but I never did. I mean what sort of a person…And wouldn’t you feel, you know…It’s the sort of thing people do when they’re desperate. People who don’t have any choices.’

  ‘Malcolm, look at me.’ And his best friend in all the world, with her split-level architecturally designed home, who had been overseas four times in the last two years and whose family had three cars at home in the garage, leaned forward and tried to make him understand. ‘That’s me, right now. I’m desperate. I can’t tell you why, but I am. So please, help me set this up.’

  ‘I just don’t think it’s the best way,’ Malcolm objected.

  ‘So give me a better one.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Then this is it.’

  ‘How will you know what to say?’

  ‘I’ll make it up as I go along.’

  ‘But how will you charge?’

  ‘How do the ones in the paper do it?’

  ‘They have a special number, but you need your own phone before you can set that up.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  Malcolm saw the look in Juliet’s eyes and knew instantly where this would end. Once Juliet took the first step, the journey was as good as finished. You could depend upon it. Some people found that admirable, others plain frightening. Malcolm was without an opinion on the matter. It was just Juliet, part of her nature, beyond reason or judgement. ‘They have to pay first. Like I give them a taster, for free, and then they send me money, and I send them a password, and next time they have to use it.’

  ‘But they’ll never tell you who they are,’ Malcolm reasoned. ‘So then, if the first time’s free, they’ll just keep ringing back pretending to be someone else.’

  ‘You know how I once said your intelligence made you attractive?’

  ‘I wrote it down and made you sign it.’

  ‘Yeah, well write down this,’ Juliet scowled. ‘I’ve changed my mind. It’s a pain in the arse.’