The Fix by Nick Earls Read Free Book Online Page A

beautiful, how many had perfect lives of a kind that could lead them to only this spot.
    Not so many years before, Francesca would have been the woman in that ad.
    Brett didn’t deserve her. That’s what I had felt at the start, and the feeling had not completely gone away. Even as the real Francesca hadn’t quite lived up to the fantasy, she had come close enough. Every time a conversation moved on without her I let myself believe, or at least hope, that she kept her best thoughts in her head, if only to honour my adolescent catalogue fantasies in which she had been clever, as well as lingerie-clad, on my bed and ecstatic at the prospect of the hottest sex of her life with a pasty thirteen-year-old virgin.
    A detached corner of the vinyl banner flapped in the breeze, a corner of rainforest lifting and then slapping back down against the wire mesh of the fence. I could imagine it as Brett’s next document satchel, the green spikes of the leaves of its generic forest undergrowth fanning out, Brett talking it up.
    I wondered when I last gave my brother credit for anything. For giving me work when I could really do with it, for instance.
    Brett met Francesca on a shoot while he was working for one of the big advertising agencies. Her face was everywhere then, and her body. She was onthe list for premieres, she never paid a cover charge, and every club in town dropped its velvet rope as she approached the door. Brett must have met her when her guard was down. If our family put on a version of The Name of the Rose, we could cast him only as Christian Slater’s Adso of Melk, the young guy who gets to play entirely out of his league when the hot chick disrobes, jumps him and nails him. In the midst of it, the movie has a fleeting close-up of his face, a mixture of bafflement and beatitude as he surely thinks he has died and gone to heaven and then realises his luck is even better. He is not dead, and heaven has come to earth, and specifically to him.
    Brett ended up riding his luck way better than Adso of Melk. He kept the girl and at the same time started his own business and turned it into some kind of success. Francesca now worked only when she chose to, taking on the occasional yummy-mummy modelling job for fun and to catch up with old friends. Most of the time she redecorated, and taxied Darius and Aphrodite around to their many extracurricular activities.
    Perhaps the only part of my life about which I had no ambivalence at all was my nephew and niece. I had missed the start of their lives when I had been in London, and I was determined to make up for it now. I was the reckless tree-climbing ice-cream-buying wastrel of an uncle who undermined any piece of discipline their parents put forward, and they had quickly decided they loved me for it.
    I heard a late CityCat surging along the Regatta Reach of the river, just beyond the end of the street, and I turned for home.
    The flat still had a damp boiled-mince smell about it, so I opened the sliding door to the balcony. I stood at the kitchen counter with a new box of fortune cookies telling myself only two, only two. I took only two, and stepped away. I had become attached to their sweet wheaty flavour, and now they were my standard dessert. It tended to go one of two ways. Either I helped myself to a finite number at the counter and had some chance of sticking to it, or I took the box to my beanbag – another piece of detritus from my childhood bedroom, recently re-beaned by my mother – and woke up hours later covered in shrapnel and fortunes.
    â€˜Food and conversation in a box’, I had written down once with a blog in mind before backing away from suggesting to the world that I was quite that sad.
    I dragged the beanbag over to the balcony door, turned the TV on and the lights off and sat with my two cookies. I cracked them open, and waited for a daylight scene so that I could read them.
    * * *
    SOMETIMES I BREAKFASTED at Café Checocho to