house in Northcote, where he would heat up something frozen for dinner and watch documentaries and reruns of QI for a little light relief—he liked to regale Billie with the highlights of Stephen Fry’s humour.
She knew some people in the lab thought him odd, even weird, but Billie saw through that and noticed his handsome face, and his patience in explaining things to others or when they teased him.
Billie often wondered if he even thought about women, but he hadn’t even tried to ask her out on a date, so she presumed it was safe to say he just wasn’t interested in women at all.
Not that Billie had pretentions about herself, but as a rare female in a science laboratory, who was pretty and had a slight resemblance to a popular character from Game of Thrones, she was nerd candy. Everyone, from the lab technicians to the top scientists, had asked her out, and even some of the married ones gave her the eye. It was exhausting, but slowly they realised she wasn’t there to play, she was there to work.
She glanced at Nick as he pulled on his white coat. He had a slim, well-built frame from bike riding, and his pants sat extremely well on his hips. She always looked at the way a man’s pants sat on his hips. They needed to hang, not cling and for a moment she wondered what was under his pants and then admonished herself for thinking in such a base manner.
‘Are you doing the soap powder tests?’ he asked, walking towards her.
‘Yes, working on lipstick stains,’ she said, wishing she had a solution for dissolving blushes.
‘What sort of lipstick?’ he asked.
‘Just lipstick,’ said Billie frowning. ‘I just went to the pharmacy down the road and bought one.’
Nick rolled his eyes. ‘Is it pearl, gloss, matte, long-wearing?’
Billie felt herself redden. ‘I don’t know, I don’t really wear make-up,’ she admitted.
‘You don’t need it,’ said Nick casually.
She reached up and touched her face, knowing she was blushing, but Nick was looking at the lipstick.
‘This is a Maybelline gloss. This has a lot of lanolin in it, so it will be more greasy than some.’
He smeared the pale pink lipstick over the back of his hand.
‘It’s a bit sickly, needs more depth,’ he said.
Billie watched him with interest. ‘How do you know so much about lipstick?’
‘I worked in a make-up lab before here, but they went bust,’ he said. ‘I actually enjoy the different compounds and ancient recipes. Some ingredients stay the same, regardless of the century.’
‘Like what?’ she asked, noting how excited he looked as he spoke.
‘Beeswax. In Victorian times, they used beeswax with spermaceti . . .’
‘What’s that?’ asked Billie, screwing up her nose.
‘It’s an organ from inside the sperm whale’s head,’ he said. ‘They would mix it with sweet almond oil and rose water and this became known as Crème Céleste or cold cream, as we know it now.’
Billie laughed. ‘I have a cousin called Celeste in France. I’m sure she’d love to know she was named after something that came from inside a sperm whale’s head.’
Nick shook his head and smiled. ‘Are you going to tell her?’
‘Oh God, no. I haven’t spoken to her in twenty-odd years,’ Billie said, as she held the lipstick up to her face. ‘I can’t even remember her.
‘Is it my colour?’ she asked, surprised at her coquettish tone.
She wasn’t usually a flirt, but something about Nick being so knowledgeable, and his compliment with no expectation attached, had her head in a little whirl. However, she took comfort in knowing she would never do anything about this work crush. Her life was simple, and love would only make it complicated. The surety of science made up for any brief love affair she might have, when she knew it was most likely destined to break her heart.
‘No, you’d look better with reds, but with a navy base,’ he said, peering at her. ‘It’s the dark hair and blue eyes combination, just like Snow White.’ He beamed at her. Then he moved and started smearing soap powder over the stains, as the door opened and the rest of the staff arrived for their day’s work.
And Billie spent the rest of the day wondering who exactly Nick Miller was and did he have a girlfriend and then Googling pictures of Snow White.
* * *
‘Mum?’
Billie stepped over the bubble wrap and packing tape that lay across the doorway of her childhood home in Carlton. It was a long terrace house, with a hallway the length of two cricket pitches, currently lined with boxes, art leaning against the wall, and ephemera from Elisabeth and Gordon’s attempt at moving fifteen years of their life.
The problem was that Elisabeth and Gordon found themselves easily distracted. Elisabeth would drop whatever she was doing to write down a poem that swam through her mind, and Gordon would find an old book that he claimed to have been looking for ‘since for ever’ and would then settle down in that exact spot to read some old volume on the history of an ancient civilisation of a far-flung country. Billie knew the only way she would get her mother and stepfather moved was if she marshalled them and assigned them tasks, overseeing the project with extreme bossiness, something she knew her mother hated.
No reply came to her call and Billie sighed, as she put her bag down on an empty armchair.
Assessing the living room, she saw plastic boxes of photographs from the shed had managed to make their way inside, but the lid had been lifted and now snapshots of Billie’s childhood lay sprawled across the wooden floors. Photos of her and her father, and her mother, photos with her and her mother’s parents, family friends, parties, but no one else. She knew nothing of her father’s past, or his family, and loyalty to her mother meant she didn’t pry into the past.
‘Billie.’ She heard her mother say her name and she pulled herself away from the photos.
Dropping the photographs back onto the table, she looked up to see her mother standing in the room, phone in hand.
‘How’s it all going?’ she asked, already knowing the answer.
‘Henri’s mother has died,’ came Elisabeth’s reply; her face went its usual shade of ivory whenever she mentioned Billie’s father’s side of the family.
‘Oh, shit. I guess she was pretty old,’ said Billie casually.
‘Don’t swear when you learn of someone’s death,’ admonished Elisabeth.
‘Why not? I didn’t know the woman,’ said Billie with a careless shrug. ‘It’s not like she made any effort to see us after Papa died.’
Billie never asked about her any more. When she was younger, she had asked a few questions, but Elisabeth’s answers were short and angry, using words such as ‘toxic’ and ‘corrupt’, and Billie,
