Page 5 of Just Say Christmas
Isaiah eyed him sadly. “Actually, they’re galaxies.”
“If they’re galaxies,” Kane said, “they’re many light years away. Maybe this is where they are now. Could be I’m ahead of my time.”
“They orbit the Milky Way,” Isaiah said. “They don’t move like that.”
Kane kept painting the cloud in anyway. Call him stubborn. “Exposed in my scientific illiteracy. Do you want to paint this ceiling instead?”
“No,” Isaiah said, “because I’d have to stand on the top step of the ladder and reach way up. I already asked, and Uncle Rhys said no. He said I could tell you how.” His sigh expressed his disillusion with the attention to detail of the non-scientific. “But he said I should say thank you for painting it anyway. Even though it’s wrong.”
Kane laughed. He was in a bit of a hurry, but Isaiah still made him laugh.
Casey said, “It’s good that you’re so tall, so you can do the painting. Lots of rugby players are tall, but you’re even more tall. You’re kind of weird, actually. I never saw anybody as tall as you.” And, yes, she’d pointed it out.
“You shouldn’t say,” Isaiah told her. “He can’t help it. He’s probably got gigantism.”
“I do not have gigantism,” Kane said. “I’m just tall.”
“You probably do, though,” Isaiah said. “It’s like dwarfism, only the opposite. It’s a gland in your brain that doesn’t work properly, but that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, just because it’s in your brain. It’s not the part of your brain that does executive functioning. That means thinking.”
“Cheers,” Kane said. “That’s a relief. I expect I’d know if I had gigantism, all the same.” The doorbell rang, and he thought,Not yet. Can’t be.He moved into the corner, decided to add some smudges of black paint, as per specifications, waited to hear that it was the wrong place for a dark patch, thought about how much criticism he was going to cop from this undersized drill sergeant for the rest of this, hoped it wouldn’t take more than an hour longer, because he could feel his time running out, and felt a drop of paint run down the back of his neck.
The doorbell rang again, and Isaiah disappeared. Footsteps back and forth in the passage, and he thought about the weekend, breathed in and out, and thought,You’re all good. Bound to happen sometime here. Harden up.
He slapped some more white on, hoped despite himself that he could wait until tomorrow for this, and heard the voice say, “Oh. Sorry. Just looking for Nyree.”
His time had run out.
3
Hardly Awkward at All
Victoria
Victoria Gibson rang a discreetly placed doorbell set beside what had to be the most unimpressive supposedly-posh front door in Auckland, and didnottouch her hair. Instead, she concentrated on observation, a much more profitable pursuit. The door was, in its turn, set into an equally unimpressive façade. A path of white stones, a couple of bushy plants stuck into pots, and three uninspiring narrow windows. As a rugby coach’s house, it was sadly disappointing, looking like nothing so much as an office block of the more utilitarian kind. Victoria’s own house had more décor elements. Well, possibly. Best not to put that one to the test.
She waited for an answer, and still didn’t touch her hair. That was because she’d been told, over and over again, that touching her hair would make it frizz—re-frizz—after all the effort she’d put in to make that not happen. Doing her new hair took almost twenty-five minutes each morning instead of ten, plus a truly mind-boggling array of shine, control, curl, and smoothing products. Her new makeup took fifteen minutes instead of five, too, which meant she was waking up a half hour earlier and was also the reason she didn’t rub her eyes or touch her face anymore. Everything above the neck was now a no-go zone. She’d had to develop a whole new set of nervous habits.
If you wanted to get ahead in life, though, you avoided counterproductive measures, which was also why she hadn’t kept on with the flash eyelashes. Did they make a ginger with naturally red lashes and brows look better 24/7? Yes, they did. They also meant you had to sleep on your back, though, which had proved the kind of sleep disaster to a stomach-sleeper that no amount of makeup could disguise. Besides, there was nobody to actually see her 24/7, and there was a limit to what she was willing to do for an abstract ideal of beauty. Or call it “attractiveness,” because when you were nearly six feet tall and not only had frizzy red hair and freakishly pale skin, but also such bizarrely long and narrow feet that you had to buy your shoes in shops that catered to transvestites—who were awesome, Alex/Amanda being the one who’d suggested the new haircut—you may have given up on the beauty idea a while back. Besides, she was a barrister focusing on criminal prosecution, and beauty had never been high on her list.
“Rubbish,” Alex had told her when she’d said that. They’d been trying on heels at the time, Alex’s movements, as always, much more gracefully feminine than hers. She’d never worn heels much, for the obvious reason, but she was feeling reckless today.Privatelyreckless, obviously, because these shoes were pale lavender. Not too high a heel, so she wouldn’t fall off them, but with a very high-cut vamp, and ankle straps with bows on the front that actually might, conceivably, look sexy.
Talk about drawing attention to your feet. She wouldn’tbuythem, but she could try them on, couldn’t she?
“Of course you can be beautiful,” Alex had said. “Every woman is beautiful. It’s about finding the wayyou’rebeautiful. I’m loving the lavender. That strap, with your beautiful ankles?Yes.You need toownit, darling. As it is, you’re barely even renting it.”
“Yeh, right,” Victoria said. “I could think of it as polish, though, maybe. Presentation. Professionally. Not with theseshoes, obviously, but with something black and simple. There’s owning it, and then there’s looking pathetic.”
“Call it what you like. Whatever works.I’dcall it confidence. Nothing sexier than confidence.”
“Iamconfident,” she said. “In my work.”
Alex gave a delicate snort. “It doesn’t count that you’re confident when nobody’s looking at you. Being confident in the briefs you write doesn’t mean you’re confident in the briefs youwear.So to speak.”
“I’m confident in public, too,” she tried to explain. “Atwork.I don’t have to be a sexy woman at work. Fortunately. Once I get into court, I am a precision instrument whose only function is to present the prosecution strategy I have painstakingly developed and then honed to its finest point, and I’m a very well calibrated precision instrument. There you are. Confidence.”
“Oh, honey,” Alex said with a sigh. “That’s just sad. You want the jury hanging on your every word, watching your face? You have to make them want tolookat your face.”
“Most trials are handled by a judge.” She knew it was a losing battle. You fought the losing battles anyway.
