LITMIR.BIZ

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enthused. "The income, of course, is lovely and having a couple of jobs at a time keeps my mind off..." Kit sculled her drink, while her expression recovered from the mental kick she'd given herself. God, O'Malley, she thought. You can't even keep your mind off keeping your mind off it. "It keeps me occupied," she finished.

      "You'll have to take on a sidekick at the rate you're going," Del said. "Oh dear. No matter how busy you get, you must not mention that idea to Brigit. She may think one session with Mangle qualifies her to be your muscle girl."

      "Oh, I don't know," Kit grinned. "Brigie could always give the bad guys a good tongue lashing."

      "Keeps your mind off what?" Angie asked.

      "Aaggh!" Kit exclaimed putting her head down on the bar.

      "Well, that was your fault," Del said, stroking Kit's head. "I tried to keep the subject changed."

      "What, what?" Angie demanded.

      "The gorgeous Alex Cazenove. What else would she be trying to keep her mind off?" Del said.

      "But?" Angie began.

      Kit, head still down on the bar, waved her hand at Del. "Go on, tell her."

      "After the shootout on the docks," Del explained, in a mock-dramatic voice, "Alex checked herself out of hospital and caught a plane to Adelaide from where she rang Kit to apologise for leaving so abruptly. Her grandmother, it seems, had taken ill."

      "But the docks thing was weeks ago," Angie said. Kit held up nine fingers.

      "Nine weeks ago," Del verified. "From Adelaide she went to Perth to 'sort stuff out'."

      "What stuff?"

      Kit sat up. "Stuff stuff. Ex-relationship stuff."

      "Must be complicated," Angie noted. "But then, Alex never was noted for a lack of complexity. You didn't do anything to scare her off, did you Kit? I mean she's not hiding from you is she?"

      Kit rapped her empty glass on the bar and scowled at Angie. "I don't think so."

      "Sorry," Angie stated, raising her hands in surrender before reaching for the Bourbon. "Well when is she coming back?"

      "Sometime this week," Kit replied. "She has to because she's getting married on Saturday."

      "Married?" Angie said reflectively. "I see." She reached for Kit's glass and sculled the contents. "No I don't. You are going to have to explain. I thought you were joking about that."

      "It was very nice indeed of Elizabeth to give you this jeep, Katherine," Lillian commented as she slammed the passenger door and waited on the footpath.

      "It's not actually a jeep Mum, and 'nice' is kind of an understatement," Kit said, as she remote-locked her still almost brand-spanking-new dark blue RAV4. "I refused it of course, but Quinn had already registered it in my name. She said if I didn't drive it she'd leave it in the street to gather parking tickets, which I would have to pay. What could I do?"

      "Accept it graciously," Lillian nodded. "You know you could have taken me home. I'm perfectly okay," she added as she followed Kit around the corner into Swan Street.

      "I'm sure you are, Mum. But you wrote your car off, and you haven't been alone since it happened. It probably hasn't even sunk in yet. And what if you've got concussion or something?"

      "But I didn't hit my head, Katherine. How could I have concussion?"

      "I don't know, Mum," Kit said desperately. "Humour me, okay?"

      "All right darling, if you insist. Oh isn't that nice."

      "What?" Kit asked unlocking the street door that opened into the foyer that led to her office and those of Aurora Press, Del and Brigit's little publishing empire.

      "Your name on the front door."

      "Yeah," Kit laughed. "Del had it done for my birthday. She figured O'Malley Investigations had been going long enough to prove I was really serious, and that I therefore needed more than a little shingle on my own door."

      "She is a very sensible woman, that Delbridge," Lillian observed leading the way up the stairs to Kit's apartment. "Although I'm not sure about Brigit at the moment. She seems to be seriously out of sorts. You two had better keep an eye on her. You wouldn't want her to go completely off her trolley and run off to join a cult, like Valerie."

      Kit stood next to her mother with her key half way to the door. She didn't want to ask, but not doing so now might make as many as seventeen future conversations completely unfathomable. She unlocked the door, ushered her mother inside and took a deep breath. "Who is Valerie?"

      "You know Valerie, from the golf club. Constance and I went to Yarrawonga with her and Marguerite last year."

      "Of course you did," Kit said, none the wiser. "What cult has she joined?"

      "Oh that new thing on the Peninsula," Lillian said, heading into the galley kitchen.

      "There's a cult on the Mornington Peninsula?" Kit queried.

      "Yes, the Cult of the Loony Bins or something," Lillian stated. "Valerie has gone quite silly with the whole thing. She's sitting in lotus positions, sporting the guru's head on a necklace, chanting in mantises. It's beyond me!" Lillian threw up her hands and then turned the kettle on.

      "I think it's a mantra, Mum," Kit offered, not wanting to explore the notion of Valerie, whoever she was, wearing a guru's head around her neck.

      "Mantra, mantis who cares? There's way too much weird stuff going on these days. I think the government is putting something experimental in our water."

      "What? To make us join cults?"

      "No. To see if we have the strength of mind and intestinal fortitude to reject their influence."

      "Are you sure you didn't hit your head, Mum?" Kit asked.

      "Don't be rude darling and please don't tell me you think the government is there to serve our best interests. I was sure I'd raised you to be more questioning than that," Lillian said, her eyes shifting focus as if she was casting her mind back to Kit's childhood and the serious political lessons which basically boiled down to: 'when you're old enough, you can vote for anyone you like but don't ever expect them to be better than the fools who are already running things, whoever they are'.

      "It's okay Mum, I know they're all self-serving bastards," Kit smiled, sitting sideways on a breakfast-bar stool so she could lean her back against the wall. "But that doesn't mean they're experimenting on us."

      "It doesn't mean they're not either. I've seen The X Files, so I know what conspiracies are out there," Lillian stated as she passed Kit's coffee across the bench to her.

      "You are aware of the fictional nature of that show, aren't you Mum?"

      Lillian gave Kit a withering look. "Just as you are aware of the rotational theory of life imitating art imitating life. There is always an element of truth in fiction."

      "Yeah, right," Kit nodded. "And that would be the truth that visiting aliens only ever abduct Americans; and only ever to carry out bizarre gynaecological or rectal experiments. Think about it, Mum. If you were an alien who'd travelled thousands of light years to get here, where would you touch down? In America, where the locals are likely to shoot you on sight; or Australia, where we'd probably invite you down to the pub for a beer?"

      "Well, here naturally - if I was an explorer alien," Lillian said. "But darling, you're quite wrong about the other aliens only taking Americans, although you can be forgiven for succumbing to that popular misconception."

      Explorer alien? Kit thought. "I can?" she asked, wondering whether it was too late to have her mother admitted to hospital for observation - just in case.

      "Yes of course," Lillian verified, her gaze suddenly shifting again, this time as if she'd noticed a couple of Men in Black standing behind Kit. "They abduct specimens from everywhere. Your thing is blinking."

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