Allison Rushby - It's Not You It's Me

As we played, I got to have a better look at Jasper. I hadn’t really had a good chance before, during the tour of the apartment. And then, of course, after the lavender shortbread incident there’d been a lot of deliberate non-eye contact. But now I saw he was taller than I’d first thought. Very tall. Maybe six-foot-four? Thin too—but not in the too-skinny ‘my mother never fed me’ way—and very dark, with almost black hair and equally dark eyes.

The one thing I really noticed, however, was his manner. My God, but he was lovely. He was charming, in that fifties kind of fashion which you see only infrequently these days, in women or men. Not the kind of fake ‘let me open the door for you, my dear’ sleazy charm that makes hard-core feminists want to pull their armpit hair out in frustration and leaves the rest of us wishing we’d had the good sense to grow some so we could do the same, but the kind of charm that makes everyone around the person who exudes it feel good about themselves.

It’s a gift, that kind of charm. And it was a gift that Jasper was using in full force that day. He was laying it on thick—flirting shamelessly with the Miss Tenningtons, who tittered around coquettishly, loving every minute of it and vying against each other in the way only identical twins probably can for his attention. It occurred to me that with his looks and his manner he should have been Irish. Or a film star. One of the old ones. The proper ones, like Jimmy Stewart.

I stopped myself then, realising I was letting my imagination get the better of me. What was I going on about?

When the game was finished, Jasper and I sank back into our deckchairs with some iced tea and a plate heaped full of tiny cucumber sandwiches, a few butterfly cakes and some of the lavender shortbread, which was proving to be quite a hit.

‘So?’ I eventually said to him, mouth full of butterfly cake. ‘What do you think?’

‘They’re the best.’ He held up half of the butterfly cake he was eating. ‘This place, though, it’s a bit strange.’

‘What do you mean, exactly?’

‘Er, croquet on the lawn? Butterfly cakes? Cucumber sandwiches? Bit like being in the middle of a Miss Marple film, isn’t it?’

I understood what he meant then. All too well. I’d had the same thoughts myself for the first few weeks after I’d moved in. ‘Don’t worry, sooner or later you’ll hear Mr and Mrs Ruben in apartment 21 screaming at each other and throwing the crystal around and you’ll take the Miss Marple thing back. I did.’

‘Ah. So these are just the civilised people?’

I nodded and laughed as I dusted some icing sugar off one side of my mouth. ‘Pretty much. They’ve all got their secrets, though, just like everyone.’ I leaned in towards him then. ‘Mr Hughes, for example, has been having a rendezvous or two with Hilda Tennington. I’ve caught her sneaking out of his apartment a few times now.’

‘Really? Hilda? Sly old dog.’

‘Apparently he needs his eye drops put in for him.’ I nodded as conspiratorially as I could before I leaned back out and started talking normally again. ‘What I really meant to ask you about was the room.’

‘Oh. The room. I’ll take it, if that’s all right. Long as you can promise me I won’t be the one who’s murdered at the start of the midday movie.’

‘I think I can promise that.’

‘My piano? That’ll be OK too?’

‘It’s fine with me. It’ll be nice.’

‘What about everyone else? They mind?’

I looked around at them all. Somehow, I didn’t think so. ‘Jasper, if I know them as well as I think I do, they’ll probably be knocking down the door to have sing-alongs. You’d better learn how to play “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” before you move in. It’s their collective favourite.’

‘Easy enough. Then I’ll take it.’ He stuck out his hand for me to shake to seal the deal. ‘But only if you call me Jas.’

So, Jas it was.

And after the ladies had made him polish off the few leftovers on the table we waddled back upstairs. I made sure we were out of earshot of anyone else before I told him the one and only condition of his moving in.

He could only stay till the end of the year.

I explained that it wasn’t personal or anything. None of us—the whole fifty-two, three cats and two illegal dogs—who lived in the building would be here this time next year. Because, in approximately eleven and a half months’ time, Magnolia Lodge was going to be demolished to make way for a swanky new apartment complex. One hundred apartments, a pool and a gym. One hundred apartments that you couldn’t swing a cat in, but would look like all the other hundreds of apartments and townhouses in the rest of the street.

Jas said this was fine, that he’d be finished uni by then and was planning on moving to Sydney when he was done.

He moved most of his stuff in that night.

Over the next six months or so, we got on brilliantly. Even better than I’d thought we would. Our lifestyles suited each other, for a start. When we weren’t at our crappy jobs—waitressing at a café for me, piano-tutoring at a kids’ music school for Jas—or at our separate unis, we were busy at our ‘real’ work.

I’d be sweating away down in the boat shed, welding together my latest piece of sculpture, or making my way to the dump to search for interesting pieces of scrap metal to use for my next. I was thinking about holding an exhibition in the middle of the next year. Meanwhile, Jas would be tinkering away at the piano, songwriting. Sometimes, if the wind carried to the boat shed just right, I could hear him playing the same bar of music over and over again, adding a piece, subtracting a piece, the song getting longer, in fact becoming a song, as the days passed. Our work was similar in an adding, subtracting, trying things out way that eventually led to an end product after a lot of sweat and a bit of good luck.

When we needed some time off we’d head to the local swimming pool, have a barbecue in the nearby park, or just take a walk. Once I took him to Byron Bay for a week, to visit my mother. He was blown away. Not a great surprise, because most people were by my mother and the things that surrounded her: by her house, which was wooden and built over five levels down a hill to make the most of the view; and by her own sculpture, which dominated every room and the front courtyard of the house and was made entirely of sandstone—not like my metal productions at all (to tease me she would call me ‘junkie Charlie’ because of my frequent scavenging trips). But mostly by her, with her booming voice and large-enough-for-a-whole-group-of-people personality.

The real surprise was the fact that she liked him back. Suffice to say that Mum didn’t get on with all that many people. She either liked them or she didn’t, and usually she’d tell them her verdict within the first five minutes of meeting them. Sometimes it could be quite embarrassing.

She told me on the phone, a few days after we left, that Jas would be very famous one day. She could tell by his aura. When I relayed this to him, Jas thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, but he still called her back pretty smartly to see if, hopefully, she had any other nice big fibs to tell him.

Community life at Magnolia Lodge went along swimmingly too. Right from the moment he started flirting with the Miss Tenningtons on the lawn, Jas was a hit with the elders of the building. The funny thing was, after a few months of our living together, a rumour seemed to have passed around that we were married. We became officially Jasper-and-Charlotte to the people we knew fairly well, or ‘the nice young married couple in apartment 10’ to the people we knew only in passing.