New Year's Eve

By Sarah Todman

Being born on the last day of the year has never done Eve Anderson any favours, but this year her birthday set off a series of rolling explosions rather than fireworks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hawkeye Publishing Pty Ltd
• Release date: May 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781923105232

Sarah Todman

Sarah grew up in an outback Queensland pub surrounded by siblings (she has seven) and an ever-changing cast of colourful pub characters. It was an extraordinary childhood that gave her a love of people and their stories, as well as the ability to pour a perfect beer.She studied journalism at university, and in a writing career that now spans more than two decades, has been a tabloid journalist, magazine editor, communications consultant, content writer, and creative entrepreneur.Sarah loves Earl Grey tea, books that make her cry, and music that makes her sing (even though she can't). She lives in Brisbane with her husband and four children (because eight seemed like too much hard work). New Year's Eve is her first novel.

Book preview

NEW YEAR’S

EVE

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Sarah Todman

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An orange bird with black background Description automatically generated

For Chrissy, the one who knows me best.

If you asked me for my New Year Resolution,

it would be to find out who I am.

Cyril Cusack, Irish actor

PROLOGUE

Just after midnight

31 December, 12 years ago

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THE night air is still and heavy with sticky heat left over from the day. In fact, I’m sweltering in my dark jeans and Doc Martens boots. The only weather-appropriate element of my outfit is the black racerback singlet I have on, and even it sticks to my sweaty skin like cling wrap. But none of this overpowers the restless shake of my hands and the wild beating of my heart.

I rush to finish the job with one last exclamation mark. The pad of my index finger aches from holding the spray can’s nozzle down for so long, but I press it even harder now, racing to fill the outline I’ve just drawn with rushed, sweeping strokes. When the paint threatens to run dry halfway through, I shake the can furiously. It manages to hold out until I finish, then I stuff it into the backpack on my shoulders and run.

Leaping from footpath to bitumen, I land hard under the fluorescent glare of the streetlights that illuminate me in all my Desert Storm glory. As I sprint across the nature strip, I hope like hell this is no different to any other night in Nowhereville, and that instead of being out on patrol like he should be, Reggie Cruther’s feet are propped up on his desk at the station. That he’s in the thick of watching an R-rated SBS show and scoffing a box of chicken wings scored for free down at the Roadhouse because of his bullshit police privileges.

My ankle twinges as I spring from grass back to bitumen, and then I’m half-running, half-hobbling towards the darkened shopfronts on the other side of the street: the side that hasn’t been improved exponentially by my artistic expression.

Well, it is artistic expression. Graffiti quoting the genius of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye can’t be judged alongside Wazza was here or Jase sux cock or Mandy Sutton rides like a rodeo.

Finally, pressed against the doors of Reilly’s Music Shop like I’m bonded to it by superglue, all I can hear is the sound of my own breathing. Short, puffed breaths fill the pocket of black concealing me from the night. I might be cloaked in darkness, but a life lived almost exclusively in this shitty town means I know the exact contents of the window display beside me. It’s one people might actually have considered to be inviting, if they’d walked past it ten years ago. A saxophone I reckon most musicians would flat-out refuse to play – on account of the fact it’s been sitting so long the brass is tarnished and dull – and a clarinet coated in a thick layer of dust. Look hard enough and you can count the dead flies decorating the ripples of sun-faded green material providing the display backdrop. I counted eleven last time I stood here.

My breathing starts to even out again. I lean forward, stealing a furtive look into the light. The street is quiet. No police siren drawing closer. Not even the grunt of a souped-up car heading for some late-night lapping in the centre of town.

It makes me bold. I step out from the shop’s entryway and onto the pavement to get a look at my finished handiwork. From Pall Mall, Nowhereville’s self-proclaimed department store at the opposite end of the street, right up to Lawson’s Solicitors directly across from me, the message is repeated on each shopfront window in big white lettering.

My skills with a can of spray paint got better with each new set of windows. Back at Pall Mall the writing jerks up and down across the double-glass shopfront like a four-year-old’s. My hands were shaking uncontrollably at first, and my rookie error of using too much paint is obvious. The word sleep has slid south, its letters dripping with white veins. By the time I made it to the curved windows of the Bluebird I had a handle on things. From there my writing is pretty neat. Not identifiable, surely, but a message no one can ignore.

‘That’s right,’ I yell, my voice charged and channelling the cynicism of my hero and book boyfriend, Holden Caulfield. ‘Sleep tight, ya morons!’

The words echo into silence and I grin as I look over to Lawson’s window again. It’s the best one. So good it could be the work of a real graffiti artist. Hitting the solicitors’ office might not have been the smartest move, but with plenty of adrenaline still charging through my veins I don’t care. I want Andy Lawson to see it. In fact, when his dad rings home from the office in the morning to tell Mrs Lawson that vandals have hit the main street of town, I hope Andy is the one who gets the job of cleaning those windows off.

Will he know? That I’m talking to him as well as everyone else here? In the last couple of weeks, he’s proven that he’s no different to the rest.

A dog’s howl a few streets away breaks my trance. I need to get out of here before someone or something arrives to bust this perfect crime wide open.

I break into a jog, ignoring the persistent twinge in my ankle. Getting back to The Imperial is one thing. Then I have to get myself up the creaking back stairs without Sylvia waking, which lately can happen at the sound of a mosquito buzzing. Oh, how I can’t wait to be rid of this goddamn town. I’m so ready to leave everyone here sleeping in their ignorance of the outside world while I get busy exploring it. First stop after uni is New York. My stolen school-library copy of The Catcher in the Rye will be with me when I find out if Holden was right about the Museum of Natural History always smelling like it’s raining outside. And when I visit the ducks in Central Park. Not once will I think about this place. I’ll be riding the bullet train in Japan and whitewater rafting in Ecuador and they’ll all still be here, doing the same shit, day in and day out. France, Italy, Ireland, Uzbekistan – the postcards that arrive in The Imperial’s mail every few weeks will be the only proof I was ever here.

The empty spray cans clink loudly in my backpack as the bakery comes into view. The Imperial stands on the corner across from it now, looming large and more impressive than any other building the main street of town has to offer, its stained-glass windows and grand entryway on the first story. A wide timber verandah runs the whole length of the pub up top. I race towards it – the only home our family has known since I was seven years old.

Crossing the street, I glance up and freeze at the sight of Mickey Porter leaning against the verandah balustrade, lit by the glow of a light in his open room. He’s watching me, both arms resting on the railing as he flicks ash from his cigarette down onto the bitumen a few feet in front of me.

Our eyes meet. It’s a moment. No more than a second or two. Then I’m running instead of jogging, my heart galloping in tandem with my feet while I try to compute the fact that I’ve been caught. By the person I was just about to take down.

ONE

MY mother says I am difficult and have been since the moment I was born. Well, even before that, actually, if we’re to put a finer point on it. Sylvia Anderson likes to do that: put finer points on things. Especially where her youngest child is concerned. Like when she tells me the reason I rarely see my brother Joe, despite us living two suburbs apart, is because his wife Rachel finds me cold. Never mind that Rachel gives Emmy Award-winning performances of geniality only when Sylvia is around, or that Joe and I just don’t have much in common these days. And when she tells me that declining fertility rates for women, coupled with my inability to form lasting romantic relationships, mean I may never have children or get married. Who says I want to?

When it comes to me, Sylvia looks at everything through the lens of a goddamn magnifying glass. It’s one of the reasons I find her so hard to deal with.

The problem is, right now it feels like someone has hit the zoom button on my life. Everything has been blown up in painfully acute detail and, try as I might, I can’t stop looking at it.

It’s the image of a 30-year-old woman with no job, a total of $4,193 in her bank account, and a pixie cut that’s fast morphing into some kind of hybrid mullet. Talk about a depressing view.

If Sylvia could get her hands on even the smallest detail about what’s going on with me, she’d be magnifying the hell out of it, and I know exactly what she’d be saying: ‘Why? Why do you always have to be so difficult?’.

The worst thing is, she’d be right. The last six months I certainly didn’t opt for what you’d call easy and uncomplicated. First, I wanted something (well, someone) so badly I ignored all sense and reason and went ahead and took him. Then things became murky and I got confused. I rode the highs, ignored the lows, and pretended the dull ache of guilt I felt could be contained. But it couldn’t. It festered into a boil that grew so big I knew I finally had to lance it. When I did, that boil exploded in my face. Now here I am, holed up almost 24/7 inside the compact confines of my rented workers’ cottage in Paddington, eating Scotch Finger biscuits and inhaling multi-series shows on Netflix, trying desperately to distract myself from the mess.

My name is Eve. Eve Lucinda Veronica Anderson. Veronica doesn’t really need to be in there but I’ve grown kind of attached to it over the years. It was my confirmation name, chosen not for any religious reason but because of the battered pile of vintage Archie comics I unearthed at the local St Vincent de Paul shop when I was eleven. Veronica, a brunette like me, always wiped the floor with that boring goody two-shoes, Betty.

Saint Veronica? Hmm, she was the patron saint of photography, I think. Photography. Go figure.

Eve. Eve is there because Sylvia chose it. A permanent reminder of the day I was born. The final moments of it, in fact. There’s a story attached to my birth that my mother has been peddling to relatives, friends and complete strangers for as long as I can remember, and I’ve found myself thinking about it a lot in the last two weeks.

It goes like this. Eve was not the name Sylvia had picked out for me as she repainted the blue baby’s room in a shade of ballet-slipper pink. Nope. The little girl she’d been longing for after two bruising boys – the one she was going to have so much fun dressing up and spoiling with Barbie dolls – would be called Lucy.

I reckon I could’ve been very happy as a Lucy. Because Lucies bring love and cheer into the world, don’t they? There’s that old show, you know the one – I Love Lucy. People in eighty countries around the world loved Lucy. So much so that the re-runs are still playing on free-to-air TV fifty years later. Just saying.

But Lucy wasn’t right, not in the end, as Sylvia will tell you. Not after everything. By everything she means a labour that lasted 23 hours – ridiculously long for a third baby, apparently. And she gladly takes listeners through every single one. Then there was the botched epidural. Botched because it did absolutely nothing to relieve the sheer agony I inflicted with my protracted descent from the womb. Sylvia wanted to lodge a formal complaint against the anaesthetist, but my mild-mannered father had a rare win on this occasion and stopped her.

All of this was a walk in the park, though, when you compare it to the panic that gripped her when I was finally delivered. Cue a deep gasp from Sylvia here. No, I didn’t come out screaming, all pink and perfect and ready to be swaddled in a muslin wrap. I was silent. And a very disconcerting shade of purple. ‘Why isn’t my baby crying?’ my mother screamed, depleted and now slightly delirious.

Within seconds, my tiny form had been transferred to a warming unit on the other side of the room. Sylvia watched, her heart pounding through her chest as the obstetrician and midwife went to work suctioning my nose and mouth. The seconds felt like minutes.

At last, the silence of the room was broken by an almighty wail: though I was under six pounds, the power of my lungs shocked everyone assembled. Then the obstetrician delivered his famous line. Well, famous to the countless people who have sat through one of Sylvia’s retellings. ‘You’ll never shut this one up now, I guarantee it!’ At that moment, the night sky lit up through the sliver of window visible on one side of the delivery room as New Year’s fireworks began to pop and crackle over the Brisbane River.

So here’s the thing: my conundrum. What if that night I knew, like the clever groundhog knows if winter will be extending its stay, that I was on the cusp of two destinies? The first would be forever tied to a date that marks closure and expiration: the final day of the year. And the second, well, it would be linked with the sense of opportunity and optimism that embodies the first day of a new one. Seconds were all that were in it.

Had I been allowed to stay in the birth canal a moment longer, had the midwife fumbled snipping the umbilical cord, if a stray shoelace had slowed Dr Winterbottom’s entrance to my mother’s birthing suite from the one next door... any one of those scenarios and I would have a different birthday and a different name. Alas, my birth certificate clearly states, ‘Eve Lucinda Anderson, born at 11.59 pm on 31 December’.

I will say this. My birthday – New Year’s Eve – has never done me any favours.

TWO

THERE is a pad of post-it notes lying on the desk next to my laptop asking me to pick it up and write on it, so I take a pen from the jar and mark one square piece of paper after another with the numbers that have been shooting back and forth in my brain all night like balls in a pinball machine. Ten for the days that have passed since I de-Eve’d every square inch of my coveted corner office at Edge, the inner-city marketing firm where I was employed for almost three years. Seven for the number of coffees I had yesterday and sixteen for the Scotch Finger biscuits I mowed through while imbibing said coffees. I really should cut back on the caffeine.

Three for how many weeks I have left until my rent is due again and four for the number of calls from Sylvia I have left unanswered in the past two days. Opening my laptop, I place the post-its in a conga line across the top of the screen.

Usually when I perform this exercise, the first rough wording for an ad campaign has been scrawled on the post-its, or some kind of loose word-and-bubble diagram mapping out a new brand build. Staring back at me, the scribbled ideas start to fizz and percolate, taking on a life of their own. It isn’t long before the next instalment of my very own brand of marketing genius has taken shape.

Now? The numbers stare back at me. And... nothing.

‘Fuck!’

Am I really sitting alone in the early morning light hoping a bunch of questionably selected numbers will reveal a hidden algorithm I hadn’t thought to look for before now? This is exactly the kind of behaviour Sylvia would have a field day over.

SNAP. OUT. OF. IT. EVE.

I close my eyes, pinch at the bridge of my nose and push all the air out of my lungs through my nostrils. Moving on!

I curl both legs up into the bucket curves of my favourite chair – a blue Eames replica – and click the inbox icon on the screen, watching as one, two, three, four, five new emails download. The number of people concerned about my state of mind?

I scan the messages. Three of them are job ads sent to me by my best friend, Phil. Clicking through them, I replay our phone conversation from yesterday.

‘Eve, just because it’s winter doesn’t mean you get to go into hibernation. It’s time to get moving.’

‘Phil, Brisbane barely has a winter.’

‘Precisely!’

There is scratching coming from outside my kitchen window. I swivel on my chair to find my neighbour Ruth’s snow-white fluffball Betty squeezing through the crack I left open for her earlier when I made my first coffee of the day.

‘Morning, cat,’ I offer and turn back to the screen. The two remaining emails are from Ben and Sylvia. Ben, as in my former marketing assistant, and Sylvia, as in... hang on, Sylvia never sends emails. For years she’s refused to recognise anything other than incessant phone calls as a valid form of communication. Her message has no subject line. I click it open.

Eve

This is your mother. Patrick told me sending you a message like this is the best way to get a response. Why have you not returned any of my calls?

Call me as soon as possible. It’s about your father.

Mum

By now, Betty has arrived next to me, looking for attention. She lifts a dainty paw and drags it down the leg of my chair. We regard each other for a moment before she repeats the action. I leave her waiting just a touch longer before scooping her into my lap.

‘I’m in no fit state for company, cat, so don’t expect conversation until I’m onto my second coffee,’ I tell her. Then, stroking at her silky back, I read the last line of Sylvia’s message again.

It’s about your father.

Even via email, this is classic Sylvia. What about him? He lost his glasses? He ordered three pallets of imported beer that no one will buy? He’s run away with old Marg Wilson from the Bluebird Cafe?

Something you need to know about my mother is that she enjoys fishing. First, she carefully baits the hook. Next, she casts the line into the water and waits. It doesn’t take long for her fish to arrive and begin to nibble: we’re predictable like that. Sylvia feels the gentle tugging of line against her hand, but this process mustn’t be rushed – there’s an art to it. She gives the line a short tug then waits a fraction more, just long enough for the hook to do its work. Then, bam, she yanks it up. Fish caught.

I glance at the time in the corner of the screen – it’s just before six. I’m up because sleep is not my friend right now. Sylvia will be awake too. She’ll be getting dressed for the day, moving about her bedroom with the well-practised efficiency she does everything with. Cooking breakfast for however-many guests were booked into the pub last night will be her first task for the day. Now is not the time to call. I’ll do it in an hour or so when the breakfast rush is done.

Cat adjusts her position on my lap slightly and I turn my attention to the other email. The one from Ben. ‘After New Year’s Eve’ is the subject line.

NYE

I miss you. Please come back!

Edge is most definitely missing its edge since you left. It’s 9 pm and I’m still in the office. Not cool. This is the second day I’ve missed my PT session and I can literally feel my abs softening.

Jay-Z has handed ME the Barefoot account and I’m quietly shitting myself 😬 Is there an email trail between you and Ros Wright that’ll bring me up to speed? I’ve searched the system but can’t find anything. Oh, and did you already have new logo options done up? Can’t find those either.

Call, email, text... or better yet, simply arrive at work tomorrow as though this was all a bad dream and you never left. Pretty please 😫 I’ll have 🧁🧁🧁 from Cupcake Couture waiting.

Yours

Ben Affleck

Ben is the king of melodrama. He always makes me smile in spite of myself. When he arrived at Edge a year ago, all of twenty years old with his coifed pompadour hairstyle and a wooden bento box of gourmet lunch items tucked under one arm, I had low expectations of us gelling as work colleagues. Somehow though, his over-the-top exuberance proved to be the yin to my shoot-from-the-hip, no-sugar-coating-EVER yang. We made a pretty good team. I even let him call me New Year’s Eve and I don’t let anyone do that.

His email takes some breaking down. So, Jay-Z, Ben’s nickname for Jeremy Zachariah – agency partner, my former boss, my former something – has given Ben the Barefoot account. I’m more than a little surprised. In this instance, Ben’s theatrics are warranted. Barefoot is a major account and Ben is a junior. He won’t cope. Is this Jeremy’s way of getting back at me for ending things between us? And for quitting my role at Edge?

I grab the pad of post-its and scribble down another number before adding it to the end of the line snaking across the top of my screen. ‘Thirty-one’. For the one day of the year that always seems to turn my life upside down.

~

It is after eight and I’m already two-and-a-half coffees in. Stretched out on the couch, I dial the pub’s number.

‘Imperial Hotel,’ comes a familiar gravelly voice on the other end.

‘Mickey? It’s Eve.’

His pause does its work. I’m on the defensive before he utters a word.

‘How you goin’ girl, managing to keep out of trouble?’

‘Of course!’

If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect Mickey Porter’s secret-agent brief extended beyond his role as the eyes and ears of The Imperial. The truth is, it’s just me the guy is forever looking to get dirt on.

‘I bet,’ he drawls.

Ignore it.

‘You after your old man?’ he prompts. ‘Haven’t seen him this morning but I can put you through to your mum. She’s in the kitchen clearing up from breakfast. Hang on the line.’

Mickey, my parents’ most enduring employee, has answered the phone in the bar. He’ll be in there prepping for the day’s trade. I can see him mopping the sticky floor tiles clean and laying fresh bar towels out along all four lengths of the square formation counter, stacking trays of clean glasses in the glass fridge and checking the kegs. Probably whistling an Elvis song to himself as he works.

The on-hold tune finally cuts out and Sylvia comes on the line.

‘At last, I hear from you! You got my email?’

Hello to you too.

‘I’ve been busy. Sorry.’

‘Oh, you have, have you?’ Why does that feel like an accusation? ‘I’ve been calling you for days, Eve.’ The pregnant pause that follows suggests an interrogation is coming. Then she surprises me by letting it go. ‘I’m worried about your father. He’s not well.’

‘Hang on, Dad’s sick? Your email didn’t say anything about him being sick. What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘That makes no sense,’ I tell her. ‘He’s either sick or he isn’t.’

Sylvia sighs into the phone. ‘You’re not listening, Eve. I’m saying he isn’t right. He’s moody. And secretive. I can’t talk to him. And he’s not eating enough.’

‘He never eats much.’

‘It’s more than that,’ she snaps. ‘On Monday night I locked up the restaurant and went upstairs to bed. When I woke at five your father was nowhere to be seen. I went down to get the breakfasts going and I found him sitting in the kitchen still in the clothes he’d been wearing the day before. He was shaky and guzzling coffee like some kind of madman. He looked terrible. Told me some story – that he’d been in the bar after close watching a movie, he’d fallen asleep. I don’t believe it.’

‘He probably just had a few beers and nodded off.’

‘A few drinks never puts him out for the night. Never. He always comes up to bed at some point. Eve, I need you to come home.’

My brain does a somersault. ‘Whoa. What would me coming back there achieve?’

‘You can help me find out what’s going on,’ she snaps back. ‘Talk to him. He certainly isn’t talking to me.’

‘I can’t just come all the way out there at a moment’s notice. I have... work.’ Did she notice the stumble? ‘Why don’t you get him over to see Dr McDonald for a check-up?’

‘He won’t go! You know what he’s like. You need to come