Sharp Turn - Marianne Delacourt [1]
Not just about men, about everything: a legacy from the fact that I have an unusual gift. I can see auras around people, and sometimes around objects. Occasionally, I even smell or feel things or see energy trails.
I’d been to the shrink about my gift and, instead of whacking me onto an antipsychotic, she’d sent me off to Hoshi Hara’s Paralanguage School. Betsy, my psych, was an old family friend and turned out to be more alternative than I’d ever expected for a woman who favoured Brendan O’Keefe glasses.
The end result of getting to know Mr Hara was that my gift didn’t go away, it got stronger. Now I was a fully accredited reader of paralanguage and kinesics with my own business, and I was starting to get jobs that used my skills. Like the one I was going to now.
One of my previous clients had recommended me to Madame Vine, the brothel’s owner. It seemed the madam was a forward-thinking entrepreneur who needed my skills. In return, I hoped she’d bolster my almost-bust bank account and we’d all be happy. She wasn’t exactly the kind of customer I’d expected to attract when I set up my own business, and certainly not the kind of work I’d be telling my mother about, but I wasn’t going to knock back a funds infusion because of my mother’s delicate western suburbs sensibilities.
IT’S ALL GOOD!
I cruised up a tiny side street in Leederville that was crammed with red-brick, Federation-style semi-detacheds, and pulled up outside number nine. It didn’t look like a house of ill repute. In fact, with its minimalist garden and locked letterbox, it was much tidier than its neighbours. There was no red light or gaudy lace curtains in the windows. Madame Vine ran an upper-crusty establishment that didn’t accommodate riffraff – at least that’s what my Google search had told me.
I parked Mona and reached down to my bag, sighing at the sight of the sequinned palm tree decorating its side. I’d given my favourite imitation Marc Jacobs handbag to a kid from one of Perth’s more dubious suburbs for doing me a favour, and bartered my beloved backup Mandarina Duck in a second-hand shop. That left me with my old beach bag. Hopefully this job for Madame Vine would bring me enough cash to buy something halfway respectable.
I scrabbled down the bottom of the bag for my hairbrush and then glanced in the rear-view mirror: shoulder-length brown (at the moment) hair, broad-featured, decent-enough face and a slightly wild-eyed look that was becoming a permanent fixture. Too much adrenaline and too little sleep.
IT’S ALL GOOD.
I forced my legs out of the car and told myself I was being stupid for feeling nervous. They were normal women, just like me.
Actually, considering I hadn’t had sex in several months, probably NOT just like me (my new guy, Ed, and I hadn’t done the wild thing yet on the account of me being once bitten twice shy).
My nervousness had nothing to do with moral judgments about ladies of the night. As far as I was concerned, you did what you had to in life; I saved the kick in the nuts for the bad guys. No, my angst was more about what they would think of me, Tara Sharp, western suburbs private-school girl with the posh voice. Maybe the sequinned beach bag wasn’t such a bad look after all.
The woman who answered the door was dressed in an elegant black suit, sheer stockings and to-die-for black heels. She could have been thirty or fifty, depending on how closely you looked. I had the advantage of being able to see her aura. It was a nice sunny-day blue with the faintly fuzzy edge that older people tended to get, which inclined