“Why can’t you? Of course you can. It’s easy. Just stop working for a year.”
“I’m not going to die in a workplace accident, I promise you.”
“You can’t promise me that. There was a story about a multistory crane collapse on a site last week. A man in his forties died. It could have been you. It could easily have been you.”
“That was not one of our sites, and you know, Neve, you could be hit by a bus yourself.”
“Well, if a psychic told me I was going to be hit by a bus, I’d avoid catching the bus!”
“Not if catching the bus was the only way to pay the mortgage!”
They seem to be in the middle of an argument. He tries to keep any emotion out of his voice. “This is all so—”
“You know what?” Neve interrupts. “If working for that woman ends up killing you, I will kill that manipulative, micromanaging bitch myself.”
Leo reels. Manipulative, micromanaging bitch? What the hell? He thought Neve and Lilith liked each other. All that admiring of each other’s hair at the office Christmas parties. He actually assumed Neve, as a woman, found Lilith even more inspirational than he does.
“What are you talking about, Neve?”
“Leo? Am I interrupting?”
And there she is, standing right in front of him. Lilith in her cream pantsuit and pearl earrings, frowning at a message on her phone.
“Have you heard about this drainage issue?”
She smiles. There is a minuscule fleck of red lipstick on one of her incisors.
Chapter 73
I have never really had a nickname before.
So it’s unfortunate that my first was “the Death Lady.”
I’m not keen on it.
It first made its appearance after the deaths of the elderly doctors.
That’s when Deathlady became a trending hashtag across multiple social media platforms.
Which leaves me lost for words.
Chapter 74
It’s late September. Spring in Sydney. Ethan is on the bus heading to work.
“Would you look at the color of that cherry blossom tree!” says the woman sitting next to him. She points through the window at the abundant froth of pale pink flowers.
“Beautiful,” says Ethan.
“But they never last long, do they?”
“No,” agrees Ethan, who has no idea how long cherry blossoms last.
He puts his AirPods in before the woman has the chance to point out more local flora.
Eleven days until his thirtieth birthday. It falls on a Monday, which is a shit day for a significant birthday. Especially if it’s my last.
These morbid thoughts are like pop-up ads and he can’t seem to access the right security software for his brain to stop them from appearing, even though he truly believes himself to still be unconcerned and skeptical.
Sometimes he catches himself hoping his “assault” will be quick, or that he at least gets one good punch in, although he still can’t imagine himself hitting someone.
Guys like us—
Yeah, shut up, Harvey.
What with the pop-up thoughts and Harvey’s interjections, Ethan never gets a word in.
Lately he’s been thinking about the time in Year 7 when he accidentally kicked a soccer ball into the back of a scary Year 11 kid’s head. “Run, Ethan!” cried his friends, so he did. It might have been better to have just said sorry? He’ll never know. The scary kid didn’t chase him, but word got out that he was planning to “get him.” It was a terrifying time. Like knowing the Mafia had a hit out on you. Kids kept telling Ethan he should “watch his back” and consider leaving the school, leaving the country. Fate intervened and the Year 11 boy broke his leg snowboarding and by the time he came back he seemed to have forgotten all about Ethan.
It had become a funny story, but in truth there had been nothing funny at the time about waking up each day in fear of imminent but unspecified danger. Is his thirtieth year going to be a grown-up version of those two weeks in Year 7?
He is not having a thirtieth birthday party. He always assumed he would have one, most of his social circle seems to be doing them, but it just hasn’t felt right.
There is the absence of Harvey, although the truth is that if Harvey had been alive and said he couldn’t make it to his thirtieth, Ethan would never have canceled. Your status really improves when you die. There is also the fact that all his friends know about the psychic prediction, and none of his family do, so he doesn’t want to risk getting them together in the same room. (He never told his parents or sister about the scary older boy either.)
Various small celebrations are planned in lieu of a party: a work lunch on the day of his birthday, drinks with one group of friends at a bar on the Friday night, a family dinner on the Saturday night and a dinner with another group of friends, his old high school friends, the ones who will never forget the ball-to-the-back-of-the-head story, on the Sunday night.
When Jasmine found out he had no plans for the night of his actual birthday she said she would make her “famous nachos” (this is the first he’s heard of her famous nachos, but okay) and they could watch the first episode of The Sopranos together. A while back they discovered that neither of them had seen the series and both are sick of people making them feel inadequate about it.
