Page 10 of An Accidental Flatmate

“Strange as in unknown to your family, not strange as in axe murderer.”

“Good to know.”

“But, as the son of a migrant family, which has unusually open-minded views on women’s rights, I understand your parents might not share those views.”

“I’m the eldest of five, twenty-eight years old.”And don’t ask again why I’m still living at home.Sydney house and rental prices made living on her own and helping her parents mutually exclusive. "Perhaps it’s time I lived the life I want to live.”

Lovely, hedonistic thought.

“There are five of you?” He wolf-whistled.

“Lucky I’m the only one who heard you, otherwise I’d have to cosh you. No, there are not five of me. There’s one me”—she pointed toward herself—“and there are four other individual women with different hopes and dreams.”

“It’s them you’re bankrolling?”

“I’m not bankrolling anyone.” She didn’t like telling him a half-truth. “Two are married and their finances are between themselves and their partners. I’ve already mentioned the two at home. Studying.”

“You don’t sound convinced,” he said. “Bet you worked while you were a student and contributed to the family coffers.”

“Do you contribute to the family coffers?” She waited.

He stared at her broodingly, then drained his beer.

“Don’t want to answer? That makes two of us. Could you pass a slice of that pide, please?”

The habit of handing over most of her pay packet had come in her late teens. The habit of making sure she didn’t add to her parents’ load. Not a request, more a creeping awareness that her salary made her parents’ lives easier. Two years ago, her father had been injured at work, upending all her parents’ plans. He’d returned to part-time work, but it wasn’t a solution. He needed to retire.

He wouldn’t retire until the mortgage was cleared.

“My big girl. Help Mamá.”The lullaby of her childhood. Bea had increased her payments.

Then had come the notice that payments on variable mortgages would increase starting next month. Her failure to win the promotion with its extra salary delayed her father’s retirement.

At home, guilt about letting her parents down pressed hard against her chest. She had no answers for them, no answers for the rage, devastation and confusion swirling through her.

What the hell had happened in that interview room?

Did it even matter?

Space, she needed space to think, to breathe, and to come up with a new plan to pay off the mortgage in two years.

---