And thank you, my hair is spectacular today. I found a hairdresser in Footscray that imports the hair oil I need.’ She walked up the stairs beside him, not even blinking that he’d ignored the lift completely. She told him about how well her father’s Ethiopian restaurant was doing since a review in The Age, and the recent graduation dinner they’d held for her youngest brother, now a qualified engineer.
Tessa opened the first floor door onto chaos.
At first it looked like a giant black feather boa had exploded all over the corridor. Dark feathers were scattered on the carpet in front of the costume shop and down to the Foundation’s front door. Some small, fluffy feathers were stuck on the walls, door handles and shop plaques.
‘Do you think rats could have done this?’ Milo asked, poking at a pile of shredded feathers with his shoe. ‘Do we have rats?’
Tessa had walked into the mess. ‘This is a whole costume,’ she said. The shreds of black material were easier to see now. Under a clump of cotton, polyester and feathers, a large vinyl beak was sticking out. She toed the debris away to reveal a crow mask. ‘If this was rats, we need to find another office. Or get a cat. Maybe a panther.’ She gave Milo a grin, deciding to find the weirdness funny, but he was standing at the door, all the colour drained from his face. ‘Milo?’
‘Looks like someone has a vendetta against crow costumes.’ He smiled shakily at her.
‘They’ll never get their deposit back,’ she agreed. ‘I better call Joel and let him know. Want me to call Frank?’
‘No, god no. He’s busy finalising the launch.’ The colour had returned to Milo’s face and he strode briskly through the wreckage of the bird costume to their office, unlocked the door and went inside.
Milo put his coffee and the biscotti on the desk. He could hear Tessa on her mobile phone in the corridor, calling the costume shop owner to explain what they’d found.
He sat on a chair, fiddling with the beads of his bracelet, and then let them go. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, breathing deeply in, blowing out through pursed lips. Breathing in. Blowing out.
He opened his eyes and made himself aware of everything around him. Five pens in the holder on the desk. The sound of Tessa’s voice. The weight of the leather bracelet on his wrist (weighted too with the memory of Frank giving it to him that day at the zoo). He counted the number of coffee beans in the poster. He heard cars driving down Little Bourke Street; the high-pitched ting of a bicycle bell; the deeper clang of a tram on Elizabeth Street.
Fear doesn’t rule me, he said quietly, out loud, feeling the touch of teeth on his lower lip on the ‘f’, the way his lips pressed together on the ‘m’. He didn’t even understand why the scene had so unsettled him.
His heart rate slowed.
He drew a deep breath and exhaled, and the world stopped tilting.
Tessa came in and began to close the door. Hesitated. Opened it again.
‘Close it, it’s fine,’ he said.
She did. ‘Joel’s coming over. He sounded really fed up. He says shit like this happens sometimes. Some dickheads think it’s funny. I’ll sweep the worst of it into a garbage bag, and you can read that file about in-kind donations I’ve put together. And get that look off your face, I put all the tax stuff at the back in an appendix.’
‘I can read tax stuff.’ Grumpily; very much not his usual sunny demeanour.
‘You hate tax stuff. That’s why you hired me: MBA Accounting and Finance.’ She struck a heroic pose. ‘She of the stunning brain and on fleek hair!’
She’d succeeded in making him laugh at last.
‘I should twitter a picture of your hair.’
‘You do know it’s “tweet” right? Oh, you bastard, winding me up like you don’t know what Twitter is.’
‘I’m 30-odd, not mummified.’
‘Coffee first,’ Tessa declared, ‘then I’ll bag up the bird explosion while you bone up on donations.’
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