MY CLASSES WITH MR Hara started the next week.
To my annoyance, when I arrived, Bok was there drinking miso and eating meatballs. I ignored his jaunty wave as Mr Hara led me through the kitchen – part of the desensitising process for Mrs Hara.
Thankfully our lesson wasn’t in the sitting room with the spooky Wembley Ware. Instead, Mr Hara led me to a tiny office at the front of the house crammed with books and curling certificates blue-tacked to the wall, proclaiming his martial arts expertise in aikido, kendo, jujitsu and karate. It was a comfy room, and I set myself the task of being a model student.
‘Here, you like chocolate biscuits, Missy?’ said Mr Hara, pulling a packet of Tim Tams from between two large hardbacks, and offering me one.
Chocolate! ‘Yum,’ I said, and took one.
He settled into an old studded-leather swivel chair and helped himself to several more. ‘Mrs Hara not like me eating this. Says it makes me fat,’ he said and rubbed his muscled belly.
I choked down an envious sigh. I had a good metabolism, but not that good.
‘Now you tell me some stuff first,’ he said. ‘Then I teach you.’
‘Tell you what?’ I asked, getting comfortable on a dilapidated two-seater so that I could suck the chocolate coating off my second Tim Tam.
‘How you lose your job?’
‘I punched my boss.’
He stopped munching for a moment, ‘Yes, tell more please.’
‘Well, it was complicated. I worked with this guy . . . and we both worked for an advertising consultant. Every time our boss walked into our office this colleague of mine’s aura shrank so small it almost disappeared. He was terrified of her. We never talked about it, but I could see. Anyway, this one time, I forgot to take my gym shoes after work and had to go back to get them. And I heard him in her office.’ I licked my chocolate-stained lips to calm my rising embarrassment. ‘He was screaming as if he was being tortured. Before I knew it, I’d run in and smacked her in the face. Knocked the whip right out of her hand.’ The memory burned the back of my eyeballs.
Mr Hara began chewing with intensity again; eyes wide, as if he’d reached an exciting part in a movie.
‘See, he was tied upside down in her chair – naked butt in the air. Only it was consensual.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Who’d have thought it? The next day she called me in, said she no longer needed two assistants and told me to clear out my desk. I could have argued it, I guess, but I didn’t want to stay after that.’
To his credit Mr Hara didn’t laugh, or call me an idiot like Bok had. ‘Sure, sure. You just gotta learn to read this stuff better.’
‘How?’
‘Little bit experience, lotta bit of learning.’
He talked on and on then, about proxemics and gestures, until I started to twitch.
‘You getting cuckoo,’ he said, finally. ‘Go sleep on it and come back soon.’
I filled in the time until my next class with Mr Hara by meeting Bok for coffee, and catching up with Smitty. Bok was on a salary so he paid for the vanilla slices, and Smitty was always good for a chicken and mayo sandwich if I turned up around midday.
Dearest Smitty. Married. Kids. Well adjusted. Everything Bok and I were not. Smitty’s husband Henry Evans was an overworked GP and one of my favourite people – except when it came to me and Smitty.
Henny had gone to one of Perth’s most elite boys’ schools and Smitty had gone to the nearby girls’ equivalent with moi. We all caught the same bus home from school and later, uni, until Henny bought his first car, a Holden Statesman, and then we drove with him. His mum still lived in the next street, two houses down from Smitty’s.
Henny knew every scrape and best-forgotten incident Smitty, Bok and I had ever been involved in – which was fine until the day he and Smitts got married. The day she said ‘Yes, I do’ he started to say ‘No, you don’t go out with Tara to nightclubs.’ ‘No, you don’t go paragliding.’ ‘No, you don’t . . .’ Blah, blah, blah.
His burgeoning domineering attitude had got right up my nose until Bok persuaded me it was a natural rite of passage, and that Henny would come to his senses when he realised he wasn’t having any fun.
Smitty had taken the road of least resistance at first. Then she and Henny had their first kid, which pretty much wiped her out for most things anyway. To make it worse, she had twins a couple of years later. Everything had been chaotically hunky dory for them, until Claire – the oldest – developed Crohn’s disease. Claire was gorgeous, like a young, olive-skinned Cate Blanchett, but the pain, exhaustion and hospitalisations she endured, plus the all-round difficulty of having a chronically ill child, took its own kind of toll on the family. I couldn’t begin to understand it, but I loved Smitty for hanging tough.
I babysat for her occasionally now that the kids were older and I wasn’t so afraid of dropping them. For her part, she always supported me whenever I went left field, including this time.
‘Mr Hara sounds like a hoot,’ she told me. ‘I say go for it.’
At my next class, I smuggled a packet of mint slices past Mrs Hara, who was making osso bucco, and Bok, who appeared to be her chief taster with much ecstatic eye-rolling and lip-smacking. Crawler.
Mr H and I settled into the office to watch some pirated DVDs that captured micro-expressions and micro-rhythms.
By the end of the mint slices, we had well and truly bonded. He told me his rule of thumb for auras. ‘Bright and light is good. Excepting white. White very bad. Dark colours bad too. And dark spots.’
Dark spots. I’d had some ex-boyfriends with those.
He pulled a chart from his drawer. It was laminated, like a bookmark, and had an explanation of what each colour meant. ‘You keep this while you learn. Most people have layers of colours, like rainbow. Usually one colour is most strongest though. Some have just one colour, with flashes of others. Like me. I flash purple.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You check.’
I scanned down one side of the chart. Bright yellow meant a cheerful, free spirit. The other side of the card was lined with symbols. The speckled symbol meant dominant surges. Then I checked back with the colours. Purple meant strongly spiritual.
‘So you’re basically a free spirit with surges of spirituality.’
‘Hai. Now, that man you worked with, you remember his aura?’
I did – skinny little thing that it was. ‘Pink with . . . I’d guess you’d call them swirls.’
I glanced down at the chart again. Pink was a healthy balance between spiritual and material. Swirls meant uncontrolled emotions. ‘I don’t get it. His aura was balanced, but raging at the same time.’
‘Some things do that to a person,’ said Mr Hara, then he reached up to his bookcase and pulled out a book, which he handed to me.
I sagged. It weighed only a little less than Mona’s engine.
‘Sex is one,’ he said.
‘So I should have read his aura as “horny” not scared!’
Mr Hara smiled and nodded. ‘All in here. Many, many subtleties, Missy. My chart is just the start – learning to crawl.
You take this home and study, then you can learn to walk. You get good like me, you run fast.’
Running fast. I liked the sound of that.
‘Hoshi?’ Mrs Hara stood at the door with a steaming hot bowl of soupy veal.
We both looked guilty.
‘What is this?’ she said, her ferocious gaze fixed on the gap left by Mr Hara’s book. A gap now filled by empty chocolate wrappers, no longer compressed by the book’s great weight.
Her fifty-kilo death stare fell to the book, me and the empty packet of mint slices balanced on my knee – in that order. ‘You!’ she lifted one hefty arm and pointed. ‘You poison my husband!’
I opened my mouth and it stayed open. I had nothing.
‘Bella,’ soothed Mr Hara, and began speaking to her in loving, pacifying Italian. At least that’s what I was hoping as I beat it down the corridor, collected Bok, and ran out into the blessedly Mrs-Hara-free night air.