Nine Days by Toni Jordan Read Free Book Online Page A

This may be a tell-tale sign that all is not well on the career-satisfaction index.
    Violet slips her shoes on and makes her appointment for next week. As we say goodbye she says, as she always does, I
feel better after our talk, Stanzi.
I wave as the lift doors close then hobble back to my office.
    It’s best to write up my notes now. I make a coffee in the communal kitchen amid the dirty mugs from the dental practice next door. I need some sugar to concentrate so I have a few biscuits from the packet in my desk drawer. Seeing Violet always makes me hungry. I’ve been in the game long enough to understand the power of suggestion.
    Word association: Violet.
    Crumble.
    Where have all those biscuits gone? I went to the trouble yesterday to buy the ones with the cream filling, the revolting ones that taste like sweetened parmesan, in order to slow down their consumption and what has that achieved? I have struggled through an entire packet of cream biscuits I didn’t like when I could have had cake. Sacrifice, without any reason or benefit. Life is too short for cream biscuits. I could be trapped in a collapsing skyscraper tomorrow and it would have all been a tragic waste of calories.
    Today I have been productive. I’ve seen my usual assortment of middle-class, white, usually-but-not-always women with a giddying assortment of suburban problems that usually boil down to this one thing:
I’ve always been a good girl but the world has not kept its side of the bargain. When I was younger, I thought it’d be different. I thought something would happen. I would be richer, or prettier, or more famous, or more powerful.
Or (and this one seems exclusive to women),
I’m angry. I feel this rage come out of me and I’m so fucking angry I could break my fist through a wall. It can’t be my family that makes me this furious. I love them. I live for them. But I don’t know who else I could be angry at, or for what.
    They cannot keep the anger in, these women: they drink too much, they shoplift, they sleep with their doubles partners, they scream at their children, they pay someone to take a knife to their eyes or breasts or stomach. They turn the anger inward and develop a depression so deep they cannot get out of bed. The women come to my office and talk to me for a while and they feel better. And when they’re talking to their friends and to their husbands they can say
my counsellor says,
so everyone knows it’s not just them, it’s not just some need to talk about
me me me.
It’s a real problem and they have a real counsellor to prove it.
    It’s only later, when I ease my feet out of my Mary Janes and into my sneakers for the hike to the car, check my appointments for tomorrow and pack my handbag, that I notice my father’s coin is missing.

    As soon as I’m in the car, I dial Charlotte, quickly, before she leaves the shop and I have to wait until she cycles home to Rowena Parade. She refuses to carry a mobile in case the radiation kills off her brain cells. I suspect that ship has already sailed.
    Some hippy answers the phone and, as usual, I wait, because in hippyland, as Einstein said, time is relative: Charlotte and I may have been born six minutes apart, but sometimes it feels like six years. She is with a customer or sweeping the floor with a broom made from free-range straw that died of natural causes or singing Kumbaya to the wheatgrass so it is karmically aligned. Finally, she’s on the phone and, as carefully as I can manage, I ask her.
    ‘You want to know
what?’
    I sigh. ‘The year of the shilling. What was it?’
    ‘Why do you want to know?’
    ‘I’m considering doing a PhD on the random distribution of pre-war shillings in Melbourne suburbs.’ The traffic is nightmarish. I dart around a car turning right and nearly sideswipe a truck. Times like these, I need a siren.
    ‘Isn’t it back from the framer’s yet? They said they’d only take a week.’
    ‘Yes. That’s why I’m calling. Because it’s