Singing the Dogstar Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

lip, staring at the scuffed table-top.
    I stood up. ‘I gotta get going.’
    There was still twenty minutes until my meeting with Hartpury, but I didn’t want to hang around the mess. My stomach was burning for food, so I walked up to a vacant foodie. The 3D display promised ‘delicious cuisine in less than a minute’. I chose a tempeh jaffle and hit the button. Sauce? Yes. One of those tart plummy ones that burn your mouth with acid sweetness. Plum sauce always reminds me of Louise. She used to make prawn rolls with her special plum sauce every Friday night when I came home from boarding school.
    The machine whirred as the jaffle slid onto the pick up tray. I ran my finger across the payment pad. It beeped at me: try again. This time I pressed harder, moved slower. Maybe I was out of credit. No, Ingrid never missed a payment. The lightswitched to green and the thief cage slid back. I picked up the jaffle. The heat burned me through the cellulose packaging.
    Louise was the closest I ever came to having a full-time father. She lived with us for about five years, until Ingrid switched back to men. I was seven when Louise moved into our big apartment in Mall 15. She was small and fine-boned, with a precision cut bob that turned bruise-blue in the sun.
    Back then, I looked a bit like Louise so people often thought I was her kid. It used to give Ingrid the scretes. Louise was number three daughter of one of the big Japanese families, but she didn’t pull any company line. In fact, she’d flipped the finger at her family and gone her own way, making fancy hats for hyphen society. Louise always told it how it was; she was straight and blunt. Too blunt, Ingrid often said after Louise had left us.
    The plum sauce in the jaffle was a shocker. It was so sweet my jaw ached. Louise would have shaken her head slowly, the black bob swinging across her face in two sharp lines.
    â€˜You need tart plums that are still a bit green. Not ripe ones,’ she once told me. We had been at the old Queen Vic market buying fruit for the famous sauce. She picked up two plums and gave one to me.
    â€˜Here, press it like this,’ she said, pushing her thumb into the top of the plum. It gave way and the edge of her fingernail reddened as it cut into the flesh.
    â€˜This one’s too ripe,’ she said. ‘Only choose the hard ones. They’re tart and that’s what holds back the sweet taste. It’s the combination of the sweet and the tart that makes the whole.’ She tossed the plum she was holding back on to the pile. ‘You’re selling the old screte again, Bernie,’ she said to the fruitman.
    That famous plum sauce was just like Ingrid and Louise; the joining of opposites to make a whole.
    My taste buds must have some kind of cell memory because every time I bit into that sickly jaffle, they longed for the taste of Louise’s sauce. I hadn’t had it for about six years. That’s a long time to go without something you love. I dumped the jaffle in a nearby recyc and walked out of the mess. Time to get my duffel out of the hire locker and head up to see Hartpury. I’d be early, but there’s always a first time for everything.
    Hartpury’s office was in D6, one of the original Melbourne University buildings. It was classified National Trust, so not too many changes had been made to it over the years. D6 was one of those twentieth-century boxes with lots of dark glass and grey concrete. The architect must have been having a personal crisis.
    I stepped into the old style elevator and pushed the sixth floor button. The door ground across its tracks, jumped backwards, then finally closed. The stairs were probably a better bet, but I was trapped now. The floor numbers lit up across the panel as the elevator clunked past. I tried to look at the row of black buttons instead, but my eyes ended up watching the numbers. Riding one of these boxes takes a lot of trust. For all you