1
On The Beach
If Nikki West had never got mixed up with Jerry the Jerk the whole thing might never have happened. On the other hand, as Nikki said, the Manning sisters were mad enough for anything. They might have gone ahead and done it anyway.
They had known Nikki was divorcing Jerry Moulder, but the day she told them the horrid details there was a thoughtful silence which lasted long enough for even Nikki to notice it. Then Sloane Manning said grimly: “Come on, we’ll go down the beach.”
Melodie, who was one of the twins, agreed: “I’ll grab the beach umbrella. KITTEN!”
Kitten Manning came to with a start. “What?”
“She’s hopeless,” Melodie explained automatically. Nikki already knew that: she just nodded. “Come on, Dopey, we’re going down the beach.”
“For a barbie?” replied Kitten vaguely.
“NO!” Melodie paused. “Well, I suppose we could. Shall we, Sloane?”
Sloane looked at her watch. “Yeah, might as well.”
“All right,” Melodie said to Kitten. “Go and see what’s in the fridge. And HURRY UP!”
Kitten hurried out to the kitchen. Melodie fetched some beach towels. Sloane was putting the sunscreen, the Zinc and the Dimp in the beach bag. After Kitten’s choice of food and drink had been severely vetted and Ingrid Manning, Melodie’s twin, had been rounded up, and as an afterthought the Manning girls’ brother, Kym, who was told off to carry the sun umbrella, they all went down the beach. Just a hop, skip and a jump: the Mannings’ battered holiday house overlooked the sea.
“So has he gone?” asked Sloane, after Kym had wrestled the sun umbrella up and been told he could go for a swim or set the barbie up, or both, and he had gone off to do it. And after Kitten had been dissuaded forcibly from opening her everlasting scrapbook and burying herself in it, which she’d been about to do.
Nikki put some Zinc on her nose. “To England? Yeah, the pig.”
“He’s a jerk, Nikki. You’ve always known—”
“Shut up, Kitten!” ordered Sloane.
“She has always known what he’s like, Sloane. Why get mixed up with him in the first place? He looks as if he shaves his chest,” said Kitten thoughtfully.
“Hey—yeah!” agreed Melodie with horrid glee.
“His chest’s all right,” said Nikki, going very red.
“She likes it,” explained Kitten. “First they shave them, then they rub oil into them.”
“For Pete’s sake! Who?” demanded Ingrid.
Kitten replied obscurely: “You know those old Paul Newman movies?”
“Kit-ten!” shouted Sloane.
“Well, he must’ve done, Sloane! You know that thing you and Leanne Jeffries and Ingrid dragged me to? I’ve forgotten what it was called. It was on too loud. He was in that, old, you see, and his chest was miles hairier than it ever was in those old movies. So they must’ve made him shave it. –You know, Ingrid: the one where he would’ve fallen out the window, only he had double stitching on half his pants!” she urged.
“Aw—that,” said Ingrid. “Was that him? They had the sound turned up too high.”
“Yeah: deafening. There weren’t any good men in it, either,” said Kitten sadly.
“Ignore her,” Melodie advised tersely.
“William Holden was good,” said Kitten thoughtfully. “’Ve you ever seen any of his old movies, Nikki? I bet they made him shave his—”
“Shut up,” warned Sloane.
“Manly,” decided Kitten.
“Shut UP!” cried Sloane. She shoved the sunscreen at her. “Put some of that on. And stay under the umbrella,” she said clearly.
“I’ve got Mum’s skin, or so they reckon,” Kitten explained superfluously to Nikki.
Nikki herself had a really good tan. Not overdone, y’know? You had to be careful, in these days of skin cancer. Nikki was very careful about her tan. It was therefore a mystery to her why the sight of Kitten Manning’s glowing, pale, pearly curves—she was overweight, too—always filled her with a surging hot wave of jealousy. “Yeah,” she said briefly.
“They’re paranoid. Actually, they’ve confused Scandinavian skins with Scotch and Irish,” explained Kitten, anointing herself with sunscreen nevertheless. “Mum tans like anything—when she’s allowed to,” she noted, with a hard look at Sloane. “You oughta see Aunty Ingrid: she’s brown as a berry.”
“Uh—oh, yeah,” Nikki recalled: “the one that lives in—uh—”
“Copenhagen. ‘Wonn-der-ful, wonn-der-ful—’”
“KIT-TEN!” shouted her siblings.
Kitten shut up, looking mildly puzzled.
“Now that she’s finished, go on,” said Sloane grimly to Nikki.
“Uh—”
“You said Jerry’d gone to England,” prompted Ingrid kindly. “For the company.”
“That he wormed his way into with that forged reference. You should’ve shopped him,” said Kitten.
“It wasn’t exactly forged,” said Nikki weakly.
“Nikki!” gasped Melodie,
“Um, well, I mean, it was a fake, but he never forged anybody’s signature or anythink. And anyway, so what?” she said, pouting. “There’s so much competition for jobs these days.”
Ingrid sighed. “Yeah. I’m sick of temping,”
“You said there was good money in it,” objected Kitten.
“Shut up,” she sighed. “Go on, Nikki. What was his excuse for not asking you to go with him? –The rat.”
Nikki swallowed hard. “He suh-said he was rising in the company and—and I was never gonna be the right sort of wuh-wife!”
“Help, it’s like something out of the Fifties,” said Kitten in awe.
“You’d know,” admitted Sloane. She passed Nikki a box of tissues. “Here.”
Nikki blew her nose hard. “Well, I knew he was sleeping around, the pig. –That awful executive-type girl from the Fifteenth: y’know? With the red hair in a bun, stuck-up cow. Anyway, she wasn’t the only one,” she said with a sigh.
“No,” agreed Melodie sympathetically.
“Is she going to England, too?” asked Kitten.
“No!” said Melodie crossly. “Honestly, Kitten!”
“Yeah: shut up, Kitten,” ordered Ingrid. “You’ve got no tact whatsoever!”
“I thought it was logical. She sounds the sort that’d use him to claw her way up the executive ladder while the jerk thought he was using her to claw his way up the executive ladder.”
There was a thoughtful silence.
“Um—yeah: she’s right, actually,” admitted Ingrid.
“Yeah, she is that type,” Nikki conceded. “But she isn’t going, because there were three of them short-listed and she lost out.”
“Hah, hah,” agreed the Manning sisters.
Nikki looked at them gratefully. “Yeah,” she said, blowing her nose again. “Just as well I decided to put off having kids, I suppose.”
Everybody nodded sympathetically except Kitten, who was looking through her scrapbook. Sloane was just about to blast her when she looked up and said: “Here; I thought I had a picture of him: Hugo Kent.”
“Who?” said Melodie limply.
“The top boss. You know,” said Nikki gloomily: “KRP. Kent, Reardon, Pointer. Hugo Kent’s the Chairman of the Group. It’s huge, y’know. ’Specially since they took over that Pommy firm, Pointer’s, and moved Head Office to London.”
“KRP, spells crap,” agreed Kitten. “That’s Hugo Kent; and that’s his brother, Roderick, he’s a lot younger; and these are some of the Pointer lot: most of them are Poms but there’s some French cousins. I cut it out of a French Vogue.” She passed the book over. “Hugo Crap’s the bald one. Quite sexy, though,” she said clinically.
“You’re the expert,” admitted Ingrid. “Yeah, he is bald. Or maybe he’s shaved it? I can’t stand that look.”
The girls looked with a sort of distasteful curiosity at a cluster of people in evening dress raising champagne glasses.
“This one underneath, I got that out of Who. That’s Roderick Crap, he’s the playboy of the family. Never set foot in Oz since he was twelve or so. Y’know what it reminds me of?”
“No,” groaned Sloane.
“It’ll be some dumb old movie,” Melodie warned Nikki.
“Sabrina,” explained Kitten. “William Holden was in that, he was great, he was the playboy younger brother.”
After a stunned moment Sloane managed to croak: “What? If that’s that video you had on the other day, that was Humphrey Bogart!”
“No, he was the older brother.”
“YES!” she shouted. “He doesn’t look in the least like this Hugo Kent type!”
“No,” she said serenely. “I never said he did. –I’ve tried and tried to analyse Bogie’s quality,” she said earnestly to Nikki, “but I can’t. He was really quite an ugly man. And short, not that that always matters. And he didn’t have much of a figure. But I’m always absolutely galvanised by anything he’s in.”
“Believe it,” Sloane advised Nikki grimly.
“Yeah.” Nikki’s mum had always said why didn’t Karen Manning stop that girl? Nikki had always felt that however wrong Mum might be about other things, she was right about that. Kitten Manning had only ever been interested in two topics, one of which was old movie stars.
“Anyway, that’s them,” said Kitten. “You can blame them for Jerry going off to London.”
“Ye-ah... I don’t think they have that much to do with the running of the Group, though.”
Kitten turned over. “Yes. Hugo Kent sets the policy. Here: this is from back when KRP opened their Sydney merchant bank. That’s him.” She pointed to another photo of Hugo Kent’s bald head. This time he appeared to be in a business suit, but he was certainly holding a champagne glass. So was the Prime Minister of Australia. “It says here he insists that all the rising executives from their branches here and in Hong Kong have to go to London for grooming.”
“Blame him, then,” decided Melodie sourly.
Nikki’s mouth tightened. “Yeah.”
“Here: this one says he’s worth four hundred million a year. Pounds, not dollars. It’s out of a Guardian Weekly.”
“What?” replied Nikki feebly, looking at the smudged clipping on funny thin paper. Where Kitten had pasted it in the printing on the other side showed through.
“It’s English or something. They get it at that place she works,” explained Melodie.
The girls looked sourly at the cuttings about filthy-rich Hugo Kent, who had busted up Nikki’s marriage to Jerry the Jerk for good and all.
After a moment Nikki said feebly: “I thought that place only made ya read the foreign ones, Kitten?”
“Usually. This was left over,” she said vaguely.
“You have to admit it,” said Sloane with a sigh: “she’s found her niche in life. She reads papers and cuts out and scans bits all day long at work, and then she comes home and cuts out more bits!”
“Bits about rich men,” noted Ingrid drily.
Nikki was rather red. “Yes,” she said shortly, turning over. “Who’s this, Kitten?”
“What? Oh: he’s Greek. He’s married.”
Considerately Nikki avoided Kitten Manning’s sisters’ eyes.
Kitten got up. “Ya wanna know something else about Hugo Kent, Nikki?”
“No. Drop it, Kitten, will ya?” she said, scowling.
“Kitten—” warned Sloane.
“He’s the man that stole Lallapinda from Grandpa!” On this note of bitter triumph, Kitten went off to help Kym with the barbie.
“Is he?” asked Nikki uncertainly.
“Of course not!” said Ingrid impatiently. “Grandpa got mixed up with that Burgoyne and let him talk him into borrowing all that money from KRP’s finance division for that mining thing they were into, and they lost the lot and KRP foreclosed, that’s all.”
Sloane sighed. “Yes. –It wasn’t actually KRP back when they borrowed the money, Nikki: Kent, Reardon hadn’t taken over Pointer’s, then. But it was KRP by the time they foreclosed.”
“Do you mean your grandfather put up his property as collateral?” croaked Nikki.
“Yeah, didn’t you know?” said Ingrid glumly.
“Shit, no,” she said numbly.
“All right: it was a dumb thing to do and he deserved to lose it!” said Melodie crossly.
“Yeah,” agreed her twin. “And if anyone besides Grandpa was to blame, it was that Burgoyne pig that talked him into it, not KRP.”
“Mm,” said Nikki, licking her lips. “So that’s why KRP have got Lallapinda.”
“Yes,” said Melodie, looking sideways at Sloane.
“They have done it up beautifully,” Nikki admitted uneasily. “It’s used it as the venue for all the big conferences.”
Sloane got up. “We know.” She strode off to tell Kym and Kitten what they were doing wrong with the barbie.
Nikki looked awkwardly at the twins. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. Sloane can remember when Grandpa used to live there,” Ingrid explained kindly.
Nikki nodded: Sloane was twenty-nine, but she and the twins, who had been in the same class at school, were only twenty-two. Kitten was twenty-five but you’d never have guessed it from the way she acted. Kym was twenty-four and in Nikki West’s considered opinion he was about as out of it as Kitten was. There was another brother, Derek, between Sloane and Kitten, but he was married and lived in Western Australia. Nikki’s mum’s expressed opinion was that he was the only member of the entire family that was sane, and fond though Nikki was of them all, she couldn’t help feeling that Mum had something, there.
The Mannings were a bright enough family but none of them had ever done anything much with their brains, except Derek and Sloane. Apart from Melodie, they’d all topped their classes at the local schools, even Kitten, in spite of her two interests which she had already developed in her teens. Derek had gone into accountancy. He was already a partner. And Sloane was doing okay now, after a shaky start, but the rest of them! Sometimes Nikki wondered if Mum was right and it was because Dick and Karen Manning had always been more interested in their own professions than they were in their kids—though that was outdated garbage, really. Dick was a professor, he taught engineering, and wouldn’t you have thought he’d have insisted all his kids go to uni? But he hadn’t. It was electronic engineering, all to do with computers and junk, and maybe that was how he’d met Karen. She was a programmer and Nikki had given up believing Mum on the subject of how they always burnt out, because Karen Manning manifestly hadn’t. She changed jobs a lot but that was because whenever she saw an opportunity of going for a higher salary, she took it. Good programmers could more or less set their own price, it appeared. Well, good on her, Nikki wouldn’t have half minded being able to set her own price, instead of being stuck on the fourteenth floor of the building in downtown Sydney owned by KRP!
The tall building didn’t have “KRP” on top of it, and Nikki would never have known that the Group in fact owned it instead of just renting the several floors it occupied, but for Kitten Manning. Kitten had found out. You could, she said, it was easy: you could find out who owned any piece of real estate in the city. Or suburbs. Nikki and her friend Tonya from the Fourteenth had been stunned by this detective ability in Kitten Manning, but then they’d realised: it was connected with her interest in rich men.
Kitten, as Sloane had just mentioned, worked for what had been a news-clipping agency but now called itself a current-awareness service. Still in the same old building, mind you. Most of the girls there clipped and scanned the Australian papers or got Aussie news stuff off the Internet, of course, and then it was emailed out to the clients. However, although Kitten got put onto those when she’d done her own ones, the main reason the place seemed to have hired her was that they had two or three clients who required foreign-language business-related news. There was a Greek-Australian girl who did both the Australian and overseas Greek stuff, a Chinese-Australian girl who did the stuff from Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan, and Kitten for the European stuff. She was good at languages. Nikki’s mum reckoned she got it from Karen and that that and the blonde hair, fair skin and blue eyes were all they had in common. Nikki had long since given up arguing with Mum about anything, but to herself she thought that that wasn’t all, ’cos in her way, Kitten was just as hard-boiled as Karen Manning was. Like for instance, when the Paxtons’ dog had been hit by a car and the Paxtons were out and it had lain in the gutter, moaning, it was really dreadful, Karen, who had been home from work with a bad cold, had gone right out and shot it. The Wests hadn't even known the Mannings kept a gun in the house! When Nikki’s dad got home from work he’d said that of course, putting the poor thing out of its misery was the only thing to do, and Mr Paxton had gone over and shaken Karen’s hand, but all the same! There was a difference between saying it was the only thing to do, and doing it! Kitten was like that, too. Well, she hadn’t specifically had to shoot a wounded animal, but Nikki didn’t doubt she’d do it. She might miss, though: she was as hard-boiled as her mother, but nothing like as practical.
Apart from Derek, Sloane was the only practical one of the Manning children. She was a tall young woman, very slim—a really good figure, y’know? Nikki went religiously to the gym three evenings a week after work and always went for a run on Sundays, and played tennis in the season on Saturdays, but even so she had to watch what she ate. But Sloane just went for a bit of a run in the mornings, only about half an hour, Nikki knew that because when she’d been flatting with her she used to go with her, and that was It. She could eat anything, too. Occasionally the girls from the flat went to Sizzler’s for lunch, just for a change, and Sloane always had two huge helpings of pasta on top of soup, and then mountains of salad. She didn’t have pudding but that was because she didn’t like their puddings. She reckoned she was getting her money’s worth. If Nikki had got her money’s worth out of Sizzler’s she’d have been the size of a house!
Sloane had been to uni, but she hadn’t taken anything useful, mind you: you couldn’t do much with a B.A. Nikki’s mum had thought she should have done a teaching diploma afterwards but she hadn’t. She’d done part-time modelling while she was at uni and when she finished her degree she’d done it full-time for a bit. She hadn’t done spectacularly well, though she had got a reasonable amount of work. Nikki’s private opinion was that she was too cold-looking. It wasn’t today’s look, y’know? She had her mother’s very neat features: small straight nose, wide eyes, though Sloane’s were a light hazel, not Karen’s bright Scandinavian blue, and a well-shaped mouth: not too large, but certainly not narrow. Her face was oval with prominent cheekbones and usually wore a calm expression. Her thick, straight hair was naturally a very light brown and after the modelling she’d gone back to it. She usually wore it in a very plain style, long enough to put up in a French roll or just tied back neatly. It was an elegant look, but cold, y’know?
When she’d given up modelling she and a friend had started a temp agency. Everyone had said they were mad, there was a Helluva lot of competition from the big agencies, but they’d managed to find their own niche in the market. They sometimes supplied office staff, they had some girls with secretarial skills on their books, but mainly they supplied Girl Fridays. You weren’t allowed to call them that any more, because of non-sexist advertising: Sloane and Gail had been ropeable when they’d found that out. “Person Fridays” sounded real silly, y’know? A lot of Sloane’s ex-model friends were on their books, but anyone they took on had to be willing to be versatile and go anywhere at a moment’s notice. A lot of the jobs they got were demonstration work: women with the right looks who could talk into a microphone selling cheese bits in the supermarkets: that sort of thing. They also supplied emergency domestic staff, both for the occasional party, office or private, or to fill in when someone’s housekeeper or driver went sick or took their annual leave. You’d be surprised how many rich people there were in Sydney that did have housekeepers and drivers and even maids. The firm was called RightSmart—they supplied their staff smartly and didn’t take on anybody who couldn’t present a smart appearance when required. After a couple of really hard years they were now doing well. It was very, very hard work, though, and it wasn’t often that Sloane could get away with the family for a holiday, like she was this summer. As it was, she was spending half the time on the phone talking to Gail back at the office.
Ingrid Manning was, as she had just said herself, a temp, and on RightSmart’s books, though she was signed on with several other agencies as well. At school she had taken out all the science prizes in their Year Twelve year. She should have gone on with her science at uni, but of course Karen and Dick Manning hadn’t made her, so she hadn’t. She’d done secretarial stuff at night school during Year Twelve—while the rest of the class were battling just to keep up with their homework—and as soon as she left school had done an intensive three months’ course, from which she’d emerged at the top of her class. It hadn’t taken her long to find a nice job with a legal firm. That had lasted four months to the day: then Ingrid had worked out that because of casual loading, temping was more lucrative so long as you didn’t need sick leave. Ingrid didn’t think she needed sick leave at her age, she never even got the flu, and with the casual loading she could more than afford to take several weeks off a year and still come out on top. She’d been temping for four years now and had done so well that she could afford to take a holiday whenever she felt like it. Like she was doing, now. She’d been at the beach house for three weeks already; the rest of them had only come over a couple of days before Christmas. This was all very well in its way but, as Nikki’s mum pointed out, there was no future in temping. And now Ingrid was saying she was fed up with it! Well, no wonder.
Ingrid was, after Kitten, who was spectacularly pretty even if she was overweight, the prettiest of the Manning girls. Her hair was the very pale, natural blonde of her mother’s and Kitten’s. If you looked very, very closely at it, as the fascinated girls at school had of course done, you could see that it was pale silvery-blonde right to the roots and that at the hairline the little curly wisps were even paler. Her face was a little rounder than Sloane’s and her mouth was wider, though still very well shaped, and these factors gave her a sweet expression, a bit like Kitten’s. Which in Ingrid’s case was not exactly an indication of character. The eyes were huge and a greenish hazel, greener than Sloane’s, and she had darkened the lashes ever since she was thirteen: the effect was really spectacular. She wore her thick blonde waves long, to about a hand’s span above the waist, and cut straight across. She regularly had a trim, it strengthened the growth and got rid of any spilt ends. Her skin was naturally darker than Kitten’s or their mother’s, and she was usually lightly tanned. It suited her. She looked fabulous in all those dim, greeny-yellow or greeny-grey or pale tan shades that Nikki West looked awful in. Like Sloane, Ingrid was very slim, but not as tall. And she worked at keeping slim, Nikki knew that.
Melodie was physically very unlike her twin. Some of the girls at school had refused to believe that they were twins. Melodie was the shortest Manning sister. She was very cute-looking, with a turned-up nose, a wide mouth, and a wide, shallow jaw. The same big greenish hazel eyes as her twin’s. Her hair was brown, like her father’s, and naturally very curly. These days she was wearing it very short at the back and over the ears and just letting it curl a bit on top. Just before Christmas she had had it trimmed into more a sort of waify look: wisps on the forehead. Nikki wasn’t sure she liked it. Though Melodie always looked cute. Melodie was lightly tanned and also slightly freckled and if anyone thought freckles weren’t cute, they only had to look at Melodie Manning, and they’d know! She had a cheeky expression and what with that and the cute little figure and that trick she had of putting her head sideways and looking up at them, had always had loads more boyfriends than anyone else at school except Kitten.
Which made it all the odder that it wasn’t Melodie who’d got married at nineteen, but Ingrid. Of course Ingrid hadn’t stopped temping when she married Rick Venning. They had stayed married for, if anyone was counting, sixteen months. Then she’d suddenly turned up back at the girls’ flat, saying she’d had enough of it and Rick was a nerd with porridge for brains. Everyone already knew that, of course. Though as everyone also knew that porridge gave Ingrid hives, she was allergic to it or something, it had been difficult to say much in reply. As far as Nikki knew she had never told any of the girls at the flat exactly what had gone wrong. Of course Melodie and Ingrid stuck together, that was only natural, but Nikki didn’t think for a moment that Melodie would have managed to get out of Ingrid why she’d busted up with Rick. He’d kept ringing her up for about six months, begging her to come back, but Ingrid had had the phone at the flat changed to a silent number. She had simply written Rick Venning off. Ingrid was like that. Kylie Gordon from school had once borrowed her Reeboks without asking her, and even though up until then Kylie had been her best friend, Ingrid had written her off: she’d never spoken to her again.
Melodie wasn’t like that at all: she had a sunny, sweet nature and was always laughing. Unlike her twin, she hadn’t had any idea of what she wanted to do when she left school. She wasn’t interested in uni, she’d had enough of swot. Which, considering that Dick and Karen Manning could well have afforded to let her go, was an awful pity. Nikki’s own mum would have been ropeable if she’d done what Melodie had after Year Twelve, which was hang around home for four whole months doing nothing! Well, nothing but go to the beach or the flicks or discos with a succession of boyfriends. Then she’d landed a job in the local solicitor’s office in the Precinct. She had done a bit of typing but not much and she wasn’t much good, though it was true she was good on the phone—not that she’d ever learnt Reception—and at first everyone had wondered how on earth she’d landed the job. Melodie had explained quite readily that she’d just gone into the place on impulse and asked if there was a job going. Six weeks into the job it became apparent why she’d got it: the solicitor had fallen for her in a big way. Melodie was still living at home, because it was so handy for the Precinct, and so of course the whole neighbourhood pretty soon knew about it. The solicitor wanted to leave his wife. Melodie couldn’t make up her mind: she liked him, but did she like him more than Bob or Duane or Scott or Sean? Not really...
Goodness knew how it might have turned out: Melodie’s kind heart might well have let her in for a long-term relationship with a married suburban solicitor who was older than her own father, but what actually happened was this. Melodie at this period was not yet nineteen. Kitten was therefore twenty-two. It was a freezing cold winter’s day, with icy sleet lashing the streets and flooding predicted for large sections of the Sydney suburbs. Kitten got into her rain gear: not the sort of rain gear everyone was wearing in the early twenty-first century, by any means. On top, a shiny pink plastic raincoat which dated from the Sixties and had come from the St Vinnies’ op shop. Underneath, tight jeans, high-heeled pink courts, and a loose, fuzzy pink angora sweater drooping off one shoulder to display very clearly the fact that under it Kitten was wearing nothing but a pale blue lace-trimmed camisole. As usual, the long, thick lashes were darkened, the blonde hair was a thick, short riot of curls, like a pale chrysanthemum, and she was wearing the bright pink lipstick she always did, regardless of the fashion of the moment. Her deliriously lovely complexion never needed foundation or blusher, since her cheeks were naturally pink and her pearly skin naturally smooth and unblemished. Facts long since verified by the girls at school. She’d experimented with lots of scents during her teens but since she’d grown up favoured one that smelled like boronia, or possibly freesias. According to Ingrid it was French and cost a hundred and sixty bucks for a hundred ml., not the concentrate, the spray, and Nikki saw no reason to doubt this report. All the Mannings except Derek could be hopelessly extravagant when it was something they’d decided they couldn’t live without—well, their mother drove a Porsche and didn’t bother to make Dick do anything about painting the house, so there you were.
There Kitten certainly was, in the hapless Ian Gruber’s dull suburban office at three-thirty on a wet, dingy Wednesday afternoon. An afternoon when Melodie had been dispatched to do a title search in the city. (Possibly how Kitten had learned about title searches.)
Kitten peeled the coat off slowly, shaking a few raindrops from the curls and blinking the eyelashes slowly at Mr Gruber. “Hi: it’s Ian, isn’t it? I’m Melodie’s sister: Kitten.”
Mr Gruber managed to get up and croak: “Hullo.”
Kitten licked her lips artlessly. “Is Melodie around? I thought we could have coffee together.”
“Uh—no.” He explained that she’d gone out on an errand.
Kitten gasped, pouted and giggled. “Help! I’ve only got my bus fare: I was hoping she’d pay for the coffee!”
That was more or less all it took. He had taken her out for cappuccinos and cake. Over them Kitten had listened a lot, smiled a lot, carelessly adjusted the slipping fuzzy angora thing on the pearly shoulder a lot, licked her lips a lot and looked up at him soulfully a lot. She hadn’t even had to mention the existence of Bob or Duane or Scott or Sean, of which Ian Gruber had been previously unaware, but she’d done it anyway.
He had broken his date with Melodie for that evening and taken Kitten to dinner. Over it Kitten had listened a lot, smiled a lot... Well, you get the picture. Mr Gruber had decided perhaps he didn’t want a relationship with Melodie just yet, after all. In fact when Melodie found out what had happened he decided he didn’t even want to walk out on his marriage. The more so as by that time Kitten had simply disappeared. –Mr Gruber hadn’t realised that she didn’t live at home. And she had never given him her phone number.
Some sisters might have been furious when Kitten revealed what she’d done but Melodie had been relieved: It had made up her mind for her. Well, if he could do that—!
Those who wondered, as Nikki West certainly had done, whether Kitten had actually slept with him, were met by a blank blue stare and the reply: “Yes, of course: he expected me to.” According to Nikki’s mum that girl had the morals of an alley cat and the sisters weren’t much better. Nikki didn’t know that she entirely disagreed, at least so far as Kitten was concerned.
After Mr Gruber Melodie hadn’t shown any signs of wanting to settle down with anybody and had gone on happily seeing Bob and Duane and Scott and Sean, and Tony and Peter and Lysle... By this particular point in time Bob and Scott were married to someone else and Sean and Peter were engaged to someone else but apparently nobody had remarked this phenomenon but Nikki and Mum. Admittedly Melodie still had Duane and Tony and Jim and Gray and Ken, but… And Lysle didn’t come round any more: he’d got fed up with her not being able to decide whether she wanted a permanent relationship.
Melodie was now happily temping for RightSmart: she enjoyed the demonstration work and even the catering and odd-jobs. And as she was an excellent driver, she often did that, too. There was, of course, as Mrs West had pithily pointed out to both Mr West and Nikki, no future in it.
Mrs West and Mr West were agreed upon the point that Kym Manning was A Problem. As for Dick’s attitude—! You could understand a father not bothering all that much if the girls didn’t want to go to uni and make something of themselves, but his own son? Kym was now living very happily in the Mannings’ awful old unpainted beach house on the shore of South Australia, miles up the Spencer Gulf. The back of beyond—right. The patch of land actually belonged to the Mannings: it was all they still had of the once extensive property that had been Lallapinda. The homestead itself was about a hundred and thirty K further inland via a series of very bad back roads. Kym had gone into boat-building and repairs with a mate from school. Their place of work was further up the coast in the small seaside town of Nearby Bay, which barely even had a tourist trade. It was about twenty K as the crow flew but by road a good deal more. How the two young men eked out a living in between the summer seasons no-one knew. Well, the Wests certainly didn’t.
Even though at the moment it was the busiest part of the summer season Kym didn’t seem to feel any urgent need to be in at work. He’d certainly spent the three days since Christmas Day itself pottering around at home. Nikki was under no illusion that it was her turning up that had inclined him to do so. He never had fancied her. Nikki had never admitted to anybody that she wanted him to and was peeved because he never had.
Kym was tall, tanned, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped. His chest was hairier than Jerry’s, and that look was not In, they could say what they liked! At the moment his untidy brown, curly hair was rather long but this was very clearly because he’d forgotten to have it cut and not because of any Look he might be trying for. Kym was entirely uninterested in fashion trends of all kinds, even down to driving a rusting old ute that had belonged to his Grandpa Manning and must be more than thirty years old. And it sounded like it. It might have looked good if he’d fixed it up but Kym had never bothered. His garments were likewise: his jeans fell into tatters at the places where they got the most wear, and not at the places where fashion said it was smart to have slits in your jeans. He bought his tee-shirts second-hand, so they were even worse. And he didn’t even own a decent pair of bathers: he always wore faded old shorts. Usually, in fact, he wore them as shorts as well. And for all Nikki knew, he slept in them. Perhaps needless to state he was entirely easy-going and had never been heard seriously to criticise anything, human, animal or four-wheeled, in his life, but to Nikki West this merely proved he was a spineless nerd.
Kym was never short of girlfriends, but these relationships never lasted long, and no wonder! Could you imagine any girl wanting to live out here?
Nikki hugged her knees and looked unseeingly at Sloane telling Kym and Kitten what was wrong with the barbie. Melodie looked idly through Kitten’s scrap album, now and then making a surprised noise. Ingrid was tanning: she lay face-down in the sun, one eye on the watch which she had taken off and placed near her face on her beach towel.
After some time Nikki said cautiously: “If you’re interested, we could go over to Lallapinda for the New Year’s Eve dance.”
“Who’s putting it on?” asked Ingrid, yawning.
“The Lallapinda Management Corp. KRP Management’s told them they’ve got to get off their backsides and start making the place pay.”
“I thought all those conferences they let it for did make it pay?” said Ingrid.
“Not enough.”
“I geddit. Well—yeah: why not? Whaddaya reckon, Melodie?”
“I’d quite like to. What about tickets?”
“I’ve got loads of tickets, they handed them out to the staff for Christmas this year, only of course no-one was coming over here, so they gave theirs to me,” admitted Nikki. “Goodness knows if there’ll be anyone there to dance with, though! Um, will Sloane want to, do you think?”
“She can’t ever of danced there, she was only fourteen when Grandpa lost Lallapinda,” noted Melodie.
“I’ll ask her.”
When Sloane and Kitten came back together, Nikki asked her. A strange expression came over Sloane’s classically lovely face. “Not if you don’t want to,” said Nikki hurriedly.
“N—Um—” She looked at Kitten.
Kitten’s face was quite blank. “She’s thinking that Cal Wainwright might be there,” she said calmly to Nikki. “You know: from Muwullupirri, it’s the neighbouring station.”
“He’s one of the ones she’s practised on,” explained Sloane grimly. “About three summers back, I think it was.”
Nikki gulped. “Maybe you better not come, then, Kitten. It could be, um, embarrassing.”
“Not for her,” explained Sloane grimly.
“No,” agreed Kitten calmly.
After a moment Nikki said: “Um, how old was be?”
“Only forty-two.” Kitten counted on her fingers. “l suppose he’d be forty-five, now. He’s nice: I do quite like him, Nikki, but in today’s economic climate no farmer’s income is assured: the bottom’s fallen out of the rural sector. Muwullupirri homestead’s lovely, though. Not as grand as Lallapinda, of course.”
Sloane swallowed. “I suppose he might have married someone else by now.”
“Once he realised Kitten wasn’t serious: yeah,” said Nikki limply. “Well, come if you want to, Kitten.”
“I might not bother. I shouldn’t think there’ll be anybody interesting there.”
“Nobody stinking rich, you mean!” said Ingrid irritably. She rolled over, added some more sunscreen cream to the exposed parts of her front, rechecked her watch and lay down, putting her sunglasses on and shutting her eyes under them.
“I dare say Andy’ll want to take you, Kitten,” said Melodie on an envious note.
“I don’t want him,” replied Kitten simply.
Andy Miller was Kym’s partner: Nikki agreed hastily: “I should think not! He’s as bad as your brother!”
“He’s got a nice figure. But he’s too young and he hasn’t got any money,” explained Kitten.
“I think we’ve got that,” said Sloane grimly. She looked up. “And look out: that’s Bill Johnson down the beach. –She practised on him last summer,” she explained to Nikki. “Seeing as how there weren’t any millionaires available.”
Kitten looked round. “Good: I’ll go and say hullo, maybe he can fix the sink, Kym and Dad are never gonna get around to it.” She got up, fluffed up her hair with a careless hand, winked at them, and wiggled off on her high cork wedgies.
Since her measurements were approximately, on the scale Bill Johnson had grown up with, thirty-six, twenty-two, thirty-four, and since she had removed every shred of lining from the bright pink bathing-suit, and since Bill Johnson, though in his fifties, was a normal red-blooded Australian male, in about ten seconds’ time he was eagerly heading for the house to fix the sink. Kitten didn’t go with him: she came back to the sun umbrella, her face a perfect blank.
“Honestly!” said Sloane.
“Who else was gonna do it?”
“Is Mrs Johnson with him this year?”
“Yeah. So?”
“So Mum’ll tear a strip off you if she comes round and starts screaming at you again!”
Kitten reapplied sunscreen. “Mum was only wild because it was the middle of the night and Mrs Johnson woke her up. She doesn’t care what I do, Sloane!”
This was quite true: there was nothing much Sloane could say in reply. But she did point out weakly: “What about poor old Bill’s feelings, then?”
“He likes doing things for me, Sloane,” she said, opening her eyes very wide.
Nikki gave a smothered giggle. “You are awful, Kitten!”
“No, I’m not, I just recognise what I’m doing, that’s all.” She put on her big shaggy pink raffia sunhat—another op shop find—and wandered slowly down to the water’s edge.
“What was that supposed to mean?” demanded Nikki.
For a moment the Manning sisters didn’t reply. Nikki was okay but she wasn’t the brightest of the bright. Added to which, she took far too much notice of that mother of hers: she’d sounded just like Mrs West, then. It was obvious to all of them that Nikki knew exactly what Kitten had meant, in fact that she had fully understood its implications, and was refusing to admit as much to herself.
Eventually Melodie said kindly: “You know. Lots of girls go on like that. Taking advantage of blokes, and stuff. Kitten just admits to herself that she’s doing it, that’s all.”
Ingrid sniffed. “Go on, try to tell us you’re different, Nikki.”
Nikki went very red and got up. “I’m not as calculating as her, that’s for sure!” She ran angrily down the beach to join Kym at the barbie.
“Forget it,” advised Ingrid tersely as Sloane’s eyes lingered on the pair. “He’d drive her mad.”
Sloane sighed. “Mm. And she’d nag him to death, come to think of it. Oh, dear: I wish she’d never married that bastard of a Jerry!”
The twins nodded hard.
“I suppose we’d better go to this blasted Outback Ball, if she wants to,” she added.
“It won’t be,” warned Melodie.
“Mm? Oh: no: It’ll be worse. Tourists and Cal Wainwright.”
“Yeah. And with a bit of luck,” said Melodie with a giggle: “Mrs Johnson’ll drag Bill to it!”
Her sisters grinned guiltily.
“Oops,” Melodie then noticed: “there she goes.”
Kitten was wandering up towards the house.
“I suppose he does deserve some reward,” said Sloane feebly.
Melodie collapsed in giggles.
Ingrid and Sloane exchanged glances, and smiled resignedly.
In the kitchen Kitten gravely admired Bill’s handiwork. Duly squatting down beside him to inspect what he’d done under the sink. Possibly the fact that a few fawn pubic wisps peeped from under the cutaway legs of the bathing-suit as she did so was merely fortuitous. As she stood up again she put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself, but there was nothing accidental about that. Mr Johnson stood up, very flushed.
“Thanks awfully, Bill,” she said, smiling up at him soulfully. “It’s been driving us all mad, and Kym would never have got round to it. And Dad’s like all uni types: starts off with great intentions, and never does anything practical!” –This last was more than somewhat disingenuous: Bill Johnson had left school at sixteen to go into the building trade with his dad.
“Yeah,” he said, grinning feebly.
Kitten peeped naughtily at him. “I ought to thank you properly!”
“Go on, then!” he said with a guilty laugh.
Kitten immediately pressed her bright pink bathing-suit against his hard-on, crushed her full bosom against his chest, and kissed him eagerly. Mr Johnson returned the kiss with equal if not greater eagerness. He released her reluctantly, panting. Kitten smiled cheerfully.
“S’pose I better get on back,” he said hoarsely.
“Mm,” she said, nodding. “The barbie’s almost ready: you wanna have some?”
“No, I gotta get back,” he said glumly.
Kitten nodded tranquilly. She picked up her hat and wiggled over to the door.
Mr Johnson’s eyes had become glued to the buttocks. The cutaway bathing-suit was a very modern style which had possibly not been designed for Kitten’s very Fifties figure. “Look, Kitten, couldn’t we—?” He broke off, coughing.
“Aw, there you are, Mum,” said Kitten indifferently “We’re down the beach, if you want to share the barbie.”
“No, thanks.” Karen looked hard at Bill Johnson.
“Bill’s been fixing the sink,” said Kitten with a blithe smile.
“Has he? Thanks very much, Bill.”
Muttering a hasty disclaimer, Mr Johnson exited, stage left.
“I thought you’d given that poor sap up?” said Karen drily.
“Only for sex, Mum, not for fixing sinks.”
“Get out of here,” she said weakly.
Insouciantly Kitten replaced the hat and wiggled off.
Karen shook her head slightly but got on with what she’d been about to do, which was fix herself a light dinner of lettuce and tomato salad, dark rye bread, and cottage cheese. Oddly enough, all these provisions were still in the fridge where she’d left them. Karen Andersen Manning would have been annoyed if they’d disappeared: nevertheless she reflected drily that if her daughters didn’t stuff themselves on barbecued sausages and chops at every opportunity that offered they possibly wouldn’t have to worry about their figures so much. She did not, however, decide that she should speak to them on this point: they all had brains in their heads and free will.
Half an hour later when Dick Manning wrenched himself away from his laptop and wandered into the kitchen there was nothing left in the fridge except a packet of ham, half a carton of orange juice and half a loaf of the damp rye bread Karen kept in there because it either dried out immediately in the South Australian summer or got invaded by ants. Philosophically Dick retreated to the bedroom he was using as a study with the ham, bread and orange juice.
The sun sank over the Spencer Gulf in Technicolor splendour, the mozzies came out and Karen went to check that the screen door onto the back porch was properly closed. Then she returned to her laptop and the program she was wrestling with. Two bedrooms down Dick was immersed in a problem related to a computer simulation of a computer. On the beach Sloane passed round the Dimp and Andy, who had turned up in his four-wheel-drive which was almost as old and definitely as rusty as Kym’s ute, passed round the beer he’d brought. It was a South Australian brand that none of the girls was used to and it was heavier than the Foster’s lager they all usually drank but none of them objected to it.
Once Sloane had decided that a sufficient period had elapsed after eating and Nikki and Kym had gone off for a swim—plus Andy, who had evidently been under the impression until the very last moment that Kitten intended accompanying them—Sloane lay back on her beach towel and looked up at the velvet night sky and said thoughtfully: “Revenge, that’s what we oughta go for.”
“On Jerry the Jerk? I’ll be up for that,” said Ingrid grimly.
“Me, too!” cried Melodie.
“Good. I hereby volunteer to shop him to Crap,” said Kitten.
“KRP,” corrected Sloane heavily. “Good idea, but how?”
“Write to his manager?” suggested Melodie.
“It won’t get past his secretary: she’ll class it as crank mail and chuck it in the bin. What am I saying, it won’t get past the mail-openers in the mail room!” said Ingrid with feeling.
“Ooh,” began Kitten pleasedly, “like that film—”
“Yes. Shut up,” ordered Ingrid.
“It was you that dragged me to it!”
“Yeah, because you’d never go to anything more recent than Oklahoma, if you were left to yaself!” she retorted vigorously.
“Oklahoma is more or less my era,” agreed Kitten thoughtfully.
“Look, shut up!” said Sloane loudly. “Concentrate!”
“Kitten’ll have to meet his boss!” decided Melodie with a smothered giggle.
“Jerry’s in LONDON!” shouted Sloane.
“Oh. Well, wouldn’t his Sydney boss do?”
“No. He’ll want to cover himself: he was the nerd that didn’t check up on Jerry the Jerk’s fake reference in the first place,” explained Ingrid grimly.
“Oh, help: yeah,” her twin acknowledged.
“Aunty Ingrid’s got friends in London,” said Kitten thoughtfully.
“Yes: how’s this?” suggested Melodie. “We get over to London and find out who Jerry’s boss is over there. Then we tell him!”
“Yeah: we could find out who he is by siccing Kitten onto Jerry!” agreed Ingrid with a snigger.
“Okay—well, something like that,” conceded Sloane. “Good one.”
“Yeah: we can fix Jerry the Jerk, no sweat. But that isn’t real revenge. What we’ve gotta think about is getting back at the bloody Kents and Reardons and Pointers for Lallapinda and Grandpa’s mine as well!” said Kitten eagerly.
“That’s not a bad idea,” replied Sloane grimly. “I’d like to see some of them in the shit.”
“Mm. The Lallapinda revenge,” said Kitten with relish.
“Yeah,” agreed Ingrid. Not pointing out that Sloane had had too much beer and she’d think better of any such notion in the morning.
“I gotta warn you, though, Hugo Kent is said to be a very private person,” said Kitten. “He’s got a flat in London, and a holiday hideaway somewhere in the Antilles, I mean the West Indies, I read that in a French mag, and a castle in Scotland, he likes trout fishing. By a loch. He owns the whole loch.”
“Can you?” said Ingrid dazedly.
“That’s what the article said.”
“The whole of Britain’s locked up tight by the capitalists: why would they stop at lochs?” said Sloane bitterly.
“We’ll never get near any of those places, Kitten,” said Melodie.
“Exactly,” Sloane admitted sourly.
“Is that all you know, Kitten?” Melodie asked sadly.
“No. I’ll tell you the rest, only don’t blame me for any of it. Hugo Kent’s married, he’s been married twice. His first wife was an Aussie—from one of the Melbourne Club families but that wasn’t good enough for him: he divorced her yonks back.”
“Kitten, is this relevant?” said Sloane heavily.
“Dunno. Anything could be relevant. We may need to know what type he admires.”
Sloane sat up slowly. “That’s true. Go on, then, Kitten: what did they look like?”
“The first one first one was shortish, and reasonably curvaceous. She had blonde, straight hair in a page-boy. Well, it might not of been that In, but it suited her, y’know?”
“What about the second wife?” asked Sloane, frowning over it.
“He’s still married to her. She’s an English lady. I mean she’s Lady Something, y’know? She’s quite old. He married her when she was thirty-five, so she must be about fifty now. Well, nearly. She’s very thin and elegant and they rarely socialise together.”
“Quote, unquote,” said Ingrid on an acid note. “Is she a blonde, too?”
“Yes. Very cold-looking.”
“So he prefers blondes!” concluded Melodie pleasedly.
“They sound as different as chalk and cheese, though!” objected Ingrid.
“It might be more useful to know what his mistresses have been like,” said Kitten slowly.
“Well?” they cried.
“Don’t ask me, as far as I know he’s never had any.”
“Thanks!” said Sloane with feeling.
After a moment Melodie asked: “What about the brother, Kitten?”
“Roderick the playboy. They sent him to school in England, wouldja believe?”
“Yeah,” said Ingrid sourly.
“He’s had so many girlfriends you can’t tell what type he prefers. They’ve always got the In look of the moment, though.”
“That lets you out,” noted Sloane.
“Yes,” she agreed placidly.
“Ingrid?” suggested Sloane.
“Provided she wore trendy gear: yes,” Kitten allowed. “But we’re never gonna get near them, Sloane, we’re just hick types from Downunder, don’t kid yaself. The Kents have got past all that. Well, heck: fancy Pommy boarding schools? Lady Thingo for his second time round?“
Sloane scowled. “You’ve thought it all out, have you?”
“Yes,” replied Kitten simply.
Ingrid sat up and rested her chin on her knees. “What would we have to do to get near them, Kitten?”
“Move in the same circles as them, obviously.”
“How?” she snapped.
“It would probably entail spending a lot of money. Well, you know in How to Marry A Millionaire, they rented a very flash flat in an up-market building?”
“Uh—yes?” said Sloane groggily.
“It didn’t work, and they had to sell all the furniture,” said Kitten baldly.
“Well, thanks!” she cried.
“All I’m trying to say is, you have to have a proper strategy and be prepared to spend a lot of money. And just bear in mind, Sloane, we’ve already lost Lallapinda and the mine to them.”
“Yes, and by a strange coincidence the mine started to pay off less than a year after KRP took it over!”
“They must of had inside information, that’s why they foreclosed instead of giving Grandpa time to pay,” replied Kitten mildly.
“YES!” shouted Sloane.
Then there was a thoughtful silence.
“Hobbies?” suggested Ingrid.
“Hugo doesn’t really seem to have any, apart from a bit of trout fishing. Roderick’s are fast cars and fast women,” replied Kitten. “And he likes skiing, but of course he goes to the sort of place that William and Harry and Prince Charles go to: they don’t let hicks in, even if you’ve got the money; your name has to be known.”
“What about summer?” asked Melodie.
Kitten shrugged. “I’ve seen a pic of him at Wimbledon. Him and a few thousand others. If you can think of any way to wangle a seat next to him, I’d like to know of it.”
“Racing?” said Ingrid.
“Yeah, in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot! Um, well, they do own racehorses. Dunno... Bump into them at the Melbourne Cup?”
“Next November. Eleven months’ time,” noted Ingrid.
“We do need a long-range plan,” said Sloane thoughtfully.
“Yes! Why not?” cried Melodie. “We can look as good as anyone!“
“Yeah. That dinkum Aussie accent of yours’d go over real good, too, Mel,” replied Kitten brutally.
“Kitten!” she gasped indignantly.
“Well, it would. Roderick might look at you for a short fling, but what good would that do ya? We gotta have our sights fixed on divorce settlements and alimony.”
“What about pre-nuptial agreements?” objected Ingrid.
“You get them so besotted they’d sign anything,” replied Kitten serenely.
“That’s not that easy, these days,” said Sloane. “I mean, in the Fifties—like when Kitten was at her peak,” she noted drily—“you could get them all excited because you wouldn’t go to bed with them. By the time you got them to the altar they wouldn’t know whether they were coming or going. But what do you use for a bargaining counter these days?”
“Ask the expert,” said Ingrid drily. “Go on, Kitten.”
The Manning sisters listened to the expert.
“First you don’t go to bed, you see, and you get them all worked up. Then you do and they think they’ve cracked it. You wait until they’re sure of it and then you don’t give it to them. By that time they’re hooked: they’re crazy for more. Geddit?”
“Honestly, Kitten!” said Melodie.
“What?”
“You don’t actually do that, do you?”
“It depends on who it is and what I want out of him. Sometimes I just do it for the practice.”
“Does it always work?” asked Ingrid in horrid fascination.
“I’m not sure if it would always work with a younger man, but it never fails with older men. When they do get into your pants they think they’re the cat’s whiskers, see? ’Specially if they haven’t been getting it for a while. Then when you don’t put out it’s a terrific shock.”
“It might work,” Ingrid allowed dubiously.
“It worked on Cal Wainwright,” replied the expert smugly. “I dunno that it would on a playboy type like Roderick Kent, but why not Hugo?”
“He looks a cold type, Kitten,” objected Melodie dubiously. “Coldly controlled.”
“Yes, I’d say he is. But the bigger they come the harder they fall. And he’s overdue for a mid-life crisis. I mean, it is nearly fifteen years since he got married, and he’s turned fifty now. And if they really don’t socialise together, it’s obvious that they don’t get on. In other words, she probably doesn’t sleep with him: there’s a fair bit of it about.”
“Are you his type, though?” drawled Ingrid.
Melodie gave a smothered giggle. “No, it sounds as if he’s got over the plump blondes—that was his misspent youth! If his latest wife’s the elegant type, you’re in there with a chance, Sloane!”
She and her twin sniggered, but Kitten sat up and hugged her rounded knees, staring thoughtfully out to sea. “That’s quite possible… Sloane or Ingrid, maybe. We need to work out our strategy. I’d say attack from several angles.”
Sloane lay down flat again. “Mm,” she said, looking up at the star-spangled sky. “There’s no need to put all our eggs in one basket... I agree. Attack from several angles.”
“That’d be good. Supposing you ever work out how to meet either of the Kents in the first place,” noted Ingrid, yawning.
“Yes!” said Melodie with a stifled giggle.
The twins nudged each other but didn’t say it was the beer talking: Sloane would have forgotten all about it in the morning. And Kitten was mad anyway, you couldn’t count anything she said.
Sloane stared up into the vast, pure expanses of the starry night. “Mm...”
Next chapter:
https://thelallapindarevenge.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-road-to-lallapinda.html
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