The Men Who Bought Saturday
By: Liam Heitmann-Ryce
Tags: Money, Class, Australia, Fiction, Storytelling

The Men Who Bought Saturday

The high life comes at a high price

Image courtesy of the author

AS MATT PLACED THE GLASS OF ORANGE JUICE IN FRONT OF HER, he said, “You need to stay here today.” He was drinking out of an espresso cup with a thin gold band around the rim, holding it daintily above her head. She could smell his aftershave, the prep-school essence of synthetic roses and a splash of lavender. It was the smell of soft hands that picked up nothing other than the cheque at a restaurant. The sunshine reflected dully off his immaculate white shirt as he sat opposite her and needlessly adjusted his cufflinks. He wanted to draw attention to them, how heavy they looked. How expensive.

“And do what?” she asked, “count your shoes?”

He took another clean sip from the espresso cup. “Stay out of trouble,” Matt suggested.

His voice signposted the class of company he kept, the kind of muted executive swagger one collects when ascending multiple wage brackets. He was still undoubtedly Australian, but an educated one: he pronounced his t’s as t’s and didn’t slice off the ends of his words. It was war-ter not waw-dah, and it was going and not goin’.

Hannah hated how money had changed him so obviously. He sounded ridiculous.

She slapped her hand on the glass table. “Matt, it’s a Saturday! I need to go out and do something, you can’t just keep me stuck in here. It’s ten am, for fuck sake! What could I do to get myself in trouble at ten in the morning?”

Matt raised his eyebrows as if to say, You’ll think of something. Of course he didn’t say this, and smoothly redirected conversation: “I’ve got a meeting today at eleven. You aren’t needed for any of it, but I do need you to stay here. That would make things a lot easier for me and I’d be done by three, anyway, so just watch Foxtel or something. God forbid, read a book.”

For a moment Hannah wanted to throw the glass at his face, watch it explode over his glossy expensive skin. Blood and orange juice would splatter all over his blue suit, a grand’s worth of tailoring ruined and the potential for permanent facial damage. It was a promising idea, but she thought better of it and instead picked at the sleeve of her — Matt’s — dressing gown.

They both knew what happened when thoughts like these became regrettable, irreversible actions.

“Piss off, smartarse,” she conceded. “I didn’t bring a book with me, and it’s not like you’ve got any good ones here.” Hannah hooked a thumb over her shoulder toward the bookshelf, which was mostly empty. “What, a few John Grishams, the odd Dean Koontz… and a shitload of books about ore mining. Pretty crap library, mate.”

Matt’s eyes narrowed and seemed to darken, a sharp transition from hazel to black that Hannah found disquieting. This repertoire of threatening facial expressions seemed to be something else he had acquired from money, something to earn him kudos in board meetings, perhaps, as the new-money yuppie with something to prove in his Ralph Lauren shirt and Fred Astaire shoes. But Hannah saw through that. His cheeks were still too pink, his brown hair too curly; he was, for all intents and purposes, the same thirteen-year-old boy who caught geckos in lunchboxes on Auntie Gina’s veranda.

“I didn’t ask you here for your opinion,” he said.

“You didn’t ask me to be here at all.”

Matt laid his ankle on his knee and placed his hands on his calf, one smooth motion that suggested it had been performed on repeat occasions. “It doesn’t make things much easier for me, no. I like my own space, so I’d prefer it if you weren’t here. But that’s the way it is.”

He shrugged.

“You always did stay in your room a lot,” Hannah said. “I think you still like living inside your own head, the only difference now that you’ve got a big fuck-off apartment to hide out in.”

“You say that as though all this just fell into my lap.”

“Well with the job you’ve got, yeah, seems that way. You earn more in a year than I reckon I would in four lifetimes, and I really can’t say what exactly the fuck it is you do, Matt.”

He looked into his espresso cup as though a fly were drowning in it. Hannah remembered that he had always been fascinated by small animals in enclosed spaces. She certainly felt like one in this apartment: the floor-to-ceiling windows made it feel like a fish tank.

Matt finally emptied his cup with one quick sip, and as he stood up the steel chair grunted quietly across the wooden floorboards. He checked the time on a small Omega with a blue dial, an ocean on his wrist.

“New watch?” Hannah asked.

“Hm? Oh, I need to upgrade this one, actually. Had for it about a year now.”

She laughed bitterly. “Yeah, Jesus, that’s fuckin’ ancient.”

“Look, is there anything else you want? Some more toast? There are a few eggs left so help yourself.”

She lifted the glass of orange juice and swilled it around. “This’d be better with vodka.”

Matt said nothing and she retorted to his silence by draining the glass.

Matt took his espresso cup and walked to the narrow island of marble planted beside the kitchen table. He placed the cup in the sink and, flicking the tap on, a soft white bolt of water exploded the residual coffee grains out of the bottom. He wiped his hands on a tea towel, even though they weren’t wet.

“Right, I’ll see you later. Give me a call if anything happens.” He grabbed his bag off the kitchen counter, threaded his hands through his jacket. “Bye.”

He closed the door behind him.

And Hannah didn’t know what to do. It was ten am, only ten am, and the day felt vastly unpromising. She had been here two days in this shiny white purgatory, channel-hopping and eating away the hours with Indian takeaways charged to Matt’s credit card. He had given her licence to order whatever she wanted, but every bite was a sour reminder of her dependency on his charity, the shame of it just a further tax upon her bankrupted self-worth.

She decided to have another shower.