Fall Girl by Toni Jordan Read Free Book Online Page A

earnest youngsters knocking on doors, holding collecting buckets for some widows’ home or an orphans’ trip to the seaside. My father and his colleagues would have carried an oversized money thermometer with them from town to town. They would have tacked it to the wall of a public building in the town square and watched their money rise.
    These days we have no giant thermometers but Julius has watched his takings rise just the same. He now makes more than my father and almost as much as Sam. Because we all grew up together my four cousins are like siblings to Sam and me but I am closest to Julius, who is only a few months my senior.
    I was just learning to crawl when Uncle Syd and Aunt Ava first brought him home from Nigeria. Julius’s father had been a business associate whose success was too conspicuous and who had not paid the right money to the right people. He feared for his family. Julius, wrapped in a red cotton sack with only his false adoption papers and passport, was presented to my aunt and uncle just as they were leaving Lagos to come home and, despite their three children already waiting back in Australia, Ava could not resist him.
    Now it seems like he has always been here. Skinny and quiet at first, he is now the star among us, the one I know will succeed with his technology when the face-to-face stings of the rest of us are dead like dodos.
    We all went out to celebrate on the night Julius received the oil company payment. A new place: we never go to the same bar twice, and we travel a long way from home. As we toasted Julius and the rare birds, in the booth behind us was a drunk man of about fifty with his arm around a much-younger, giggling girl. The man was balding, with a shiny patch near the top of his brow where a skin cancer had been removed by laser. He was buying expensive champagne and making sure the whole bar knew. I know now it was Dr Eng, the snowflake researcher, with one of his assistants. It’s not just me: we all eavesdrop, the whole family. It’s amazing what you hear. Stock tips, horse tips, juicy bits of gossip that come in handy. I leaned my head back against the booth.
    What a rort. So rich they don’t even care where the money goes…the administrator is rubbish…no procedures. Just a tiny notice in a few journals that no one reads…hardly any applications…no progress reports or reconciliations. Then he said, Metcalf.
    Metcalf is a famous name in this city. Straight away I became interested. Unlike my cousins, I am more at home in high-society stings. I can and do play almost any role, but times like that in the Metcalf mansion seem the closest I can manage to being myself. Perhaps it is Ruby’s influence, the way I find myself drawn to the beautiful things of life. Expensive things. Whatever the cause of this feeling, I know the one defence we have against the sordidness of life, the dirt, the base animal nature of humankind, is beauty.
    The next day I walked down to a distant corner of our property, where my father kept his filing system in a shed that had been used for packing apples since the last century. The shed still has a clean smell that seeps from the old wood. The musty paper has not taken over yet. My father has files on hundreds of the world’s wealthiest families and individuals and companies. These days my Aunt Ava is responsible but when we were children it was our job to update them, liberate old Newsweek s and Financial Review s from cafes and dentists’ surgeries using sad smiles and stories of late assignments, then cut out anything on everyone who was anyone. It was our favourite job, this cutting and filing, the way other children make scrap books of pop singers and soap stars.
    Yet the filing system was also my greatest worry when I was a child. It seemed so incriminating. It kept me up nights. When I couldn’t sleep I would creep down to the shed at first light to test the lock, check the windows. Once, in