omeone's Been Sleeping
In My Bed
By
Steven Zelko
Copyright © 2014 by Steven Zelko
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First Printing, 2014
Steven Zelko
15 Kerang Ave,
Reservoir, VIC, Australia 3073
https://www.stevenzelko.com
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Contents
Fine, I'll go, Mother.
How to kiss a seven storey building.
Breaking and entering. Eventually.
Me. Want. Food.
Cooking oats - Step 1: Add Fire.
Copper-tasting, muddy foulness.
All I need now is pigtails.
Actually, I'm with the perfect guy.
Child-sized doors.
What window?
Acknowledgements
Fine. I'll go, Mother.
“Fine. I’ll go. Enough with the guilt, Mother.” And with that Skye hung up her mobile. She had made sure no one else was in the stalls when she had taken the third call her mother had made in the past fifteen minutes. Usually the bathroom had one or two other occupants hiding, but it had been empty, and Skye knew exactly why, and where they all were. The main boardroom. With the most important names in the company. And she had to go and excuse herself to take a private call. It didn’t look good, not good at all. But then again it isn’t every day your grandmother dies.
The notepad in her hand had her grandmother’s address and the place she would find the key to the now empty house that her mother had been raised in, and that Skye had never seen. It would only be a couple of days, she tried to convince herself. I can bring my MacBook and do some work. It will be over before I know it.
She made a show of flushing the toilet, just in case anyone was passing by when she left the bathroom, washed her hands and dried them precisely, like a surgeon would. As the door swung shut behind her, she was met by Alice, the quietest voice in every room and whose shadow was so small that she was often mistaken for office furniture.
“Oh, there you are. Mr Barron told me to come find you. He wants you back in the meeting as soon as possible.” Alice couldn’t sound authoritative, or direct, or even forward, but she could deliver a message without any hint of personality, and that’s why she had been sent.
“Thank you, I’m on my way back now.” Skye dismissed her without being dismissive.
“Are you okay? Is there anything I can help with?” Alice pleaded, hoping to obtain a vicarious morsel of Skye’s gravity.
Skye stopped mid-stride. If she admitted the issue, it might appear as weakness, but the death of a loved one, when handled correctly, could benefit her on a personal level. Having weighed up both sides, tested and measured the outcomes, and arriving at the conclusion in a fraction of a second, she turned to face Alice directly.
“Actually, Alice,” She paused for effect, “I’ve just found out my sweet old grandma has passed away.” And that was all that was needed. Alice would do the rest, taking any opportunity to tell someone else’s story as long as she didn’t have to whisper her own.
“I’m so sorry, Skye. Can I get you...” Skye had already stopped listening. She held back a smile as the scene played out. It had begun.
By the time she made it through the masses in the central boardroom of MCST Holdings, the birds had her story and had spread it. Skye had never really needed to earn extra brownie points with anyone on the twenty-second floor. Her just-shy-of-six-foot stature, yoga-toned body was always neatly presented, with a hint of flirtation, in expensive upmarket female businesswear, and that put her a cut above the MBA-clutching crowd. She wore makeup that took almost an hour to make up so it didn’t look like she was made up at all, but it was her natural golden locks, which were pulled back into a seductive ponytail, that she knew was her calling card. Especially with the handful of men wearing suits that had price tags equivalent to Alice’s annual salary. The rest of the meeting she became the humble center of attention. And to think, I still have another grandmother.
How to kiss a seven-storey building.
“How was your meeting, babe?” He always called her babe. It was the remnants of the schoolboy-savant he had been, and the way he looked in running shorts. Then and now.
“Quite well. I caught the attention of several key figures. Oh, and mum called. My grandmother died.”
“Oh, babe, that’s terrible. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, hun, except that mum is making me go look after grandma’s house til my aunt comes down from Newcastle. It’s in the bloody country.”
“Were you close to her?”
“Who, Mum?” Confusion growing across her face.
“No, babe. Your grandmother?”
“Oh. No, not really. I vaguely remember her from when I was little but when we moved away from my dad and went to the city, I never saw her again.”
“No wonder you haven’t mentioned her before. Coming home for dinner?”
“Certainly will be, what have you whipped up?”
“A wheat, gluten, starch, grain-free almond-meal based pizza. Well, technically it can’t even be called a pizza because the tomato paste isn’t tomato based.”
She swallowed back a smile as she thought about bringing home the sloppiest Big Mac she could find, if only to see the look on his eight-percent body fat face.
“You never cease to amaze me, Andrew.”
“Thanks, babe.” Even after all these years, he still couldn’t taste that particular brand of her sarcasm. “You know what they say, healthy body...”
“Healthy mind. I’ll see you at home shortly.”
On the bike ride home she compiled several lists in the compartment of her mind that didn’t need to notice the power she was putting into the peddles, the several other ill-clad ‘bicyclists’ she passed, or the traffic flowing behind her. The lists were of the things she would achieve on her short visit to her grandmother’s cottage. And by the end of her commute, she arrived at the conclusion that it would actually be a net gain because she would have an excuse not to pencil-in several people that expected her time of a weekend. It was part of the face she had to put on in order to keep up the lifestyle of someone who had a face like hers. And an ass too. Also abs.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come up with you, hun? There could be a few cute country boys.” Stacey could turn any day into a Friday night. In many ways Skye envied her. She had no expectations and lived life without the need to see the consequences of her five-year plan. Stacey had no plan. But then Skye remembered her own plans. The five, ten, and twenty year plans, and what she loosely called the ‘Lifetime Achievement’. It made responding to Stacey all that much more automatic.
“Stace, if I took you away from the clubs for the weekend, they would close down.” Skye’s backhanded compliments were so deft, even she didn’t know she was sliding in the rhetoric before it was sliding off her tongue. “Anyway, I’m already on the freeway. I’ll be there in an hour or so. My aunty will be down on Sunday, so what’s two nights? And if there are any cute boys, I’ll let you know, and you
can break a few speeds limits to get here. I gotta go, my battery is dying.”
Skye hung up her mobile and reached down for the car charger. As her hand fished into the console, she stared up at the clouds. They were puffy today, thick and calm. The loud crash shattered the silence as the windscreen shattered above her. A scream leapt from Skye’s chest before fear even settled in. She was thrown back into her seat with the initial impact. The top-half of her body then forced itself between the front seats and headed towards the back. The car stopped with a sudden jolt. She lay in shock as her car horn blared unapologetically. The accident was over before she even knew she was in one.
The freeway barrier surrounding the peaceful grass had crushed the front left side of her sleek, black, four-wheeled advertisement for sleek, white, two-legged women. Those ads were always quickly followed by a brand of ‘cool’ tampons but Skye had sneered at their hot pink flavours. Shiny things for shiny people. She hadn’t gotten the car because it was shiny but that it was shiny with a great safety rating, and she had chosen wisely. A half-a-star less and she would’ve been at a desk right next to Alice because the whole left side of her face would’ve become an homage to Cubism.
As she took the deepest breath she had taken since being smacked on her bottom by Dr. Dennis Yung, Skye sat up and stared out at her smoke-filled surroundings. Her world now looked different. Apart from the fact that her little black Peugeot 206 looked as though someone had taken a can-opener to the front left side, the bump above her right