1,000 Lies Told At 40,000 Feet High

“Good morning Miss Evan. I trust that your flight was satisfactory,” said Oliver, my personal chauffer for the time that I spent in Sydney. He took my small bag of luggage from me as we began to walk out of the airport.

“Actually, it was better than most flights,” I answered. And I couldn’t stop the small smile that formed on my lips when I thought of Chace. I saw Oliver raise his eyebrows but he said nothing. We stepped outside and I smiled when I saw the car that was waiting for me. My father liked to be driven around in a limousine –by his own personal chauffer George- but I thought that it was too over the top. If I had it my own way, my father would actually care about me like he use to and pick me up from the airport himself. But apparently he was ‘too busy’ and instead he sent Oliver to pick me up.

I had known Oliver for over two years and we had become good friends, he always knew how to cheer me up when my father acted like a pompous jerk. He also knows how I feel about limousines, and instead, he drives me around in one my father’s supposedly ‘less extravagant’ cars, a black Rolls Royce Phantom. And I had to admit, it was a very nice car.

“Your father wants to see you when we arrive,” Oliver said to me as he drove along the freeway. I tore my eyes away from the familiar scenery outside the car window and turned to look at Oliver.
“That seems unlikely,” I said softly before once again turning to look back out of the window.

“Piper,” Oliver said sympathetically, looking at me through the rear view mirror, “I am sure that your father cares about you very much. He is just very busy at work now. It mustn’t be easy for him to run an entire company almost on his own.” I sighed quietly and said nothing. It didn’t matter what Oliver said, it wouldn’t change the cold hard facts that my father didn’t really give a shit about me.

***

When I arrived home, I found a note for me sitting on the table in the foyer.

Piper,
I have someone that I want you to meet.
Come see me in the lounge room when you arrive home.
Your Father

I sighed; I wasn’t in the mood for meeting new people that my father wanted to suck up to or show off to. All I really wanted to do was lie in bed and not move for the entire weekend, maybe read a book, or if I was feeling up to it, do a little bit of homework. However, I grabbed my bag from Oliver and went down the hall towards my room. My room was fairly simple, I spent barely ant time there and therefore it hadn’t changed much since when I was fifteen. My bedroom had one wall that was all glass and looked out over the park that my father lived next to, and the rest of the walls were a pale blue colour. My powder coated white bed sat in the corner of the room and was draped with sheer white curtains. When my father had first moved to Sydney, we spent weeks talking to each other and deciding how I was going to decorate my room, now those sheer curtains were just a reminder of a father who used to care. There was a black framed mirror leaning against one wall and a dressing table next to another. My closet held few clothes, I had never needed as much as I had back home in Melbourne, and when I required something for a special dinner with my father and his work associates, I went out and bought a new dress. Some photos of my friends and I back in Melbourne were scattered around my mirror and on the walls, most from parties we had gone to and school events but apart from that, my room was void of any personal knickknacks. On the whole, my room appeared to be more like a bedroom for a magazine photo shoot than the room of a typical teenage girl.

After placing my bag on the bed and quickly fixing up my hair, I went in search of my father. His house was large but not overly so. There was the entry foyer, my father’s bedroom with an ensuite, my bedroom, the bathroom, a study come spare room, the kitchen, the dining room, the theatre room/games room and the lounge room. I walked through the house slowly; as horrible as it sounded, I wanted to delay seeing my father for as long as possible.

I found my father in the lounge room where he said he would be. My father was in his mid-forty’s with dark black hair that hid his age. He was clean shaven and insisted on always wearing a suit. He oozed power, influence and style. He knew what he wanted and how to get it. Mixed together with his good-looks and money, it seems only appropriate that my father is known as a player.

So it should have come as no surprise that the person that my father wanted me to meet was a woman, if you could even call her that. The person sitting next to my father sipping at a blue cocktail looked barely old enough to have finished high school, let alone to be with someone my father’s age. She was blonde -and not the nice natural kind of blonde colour, it was the fake looking yellow that much too obviously came from a bottle- and wore a tight strappy red thing that could barely pass for a dress. There were large triangle sections cut out of the dress at the hips and the back that showed off the woman’s -fake- tan. The dress did little to cover her -once again, almost certainly fake- breasts that were spilling out of the fabric. I couldn’t deny that the woman was pretty, she may have even been a model; she certainly didn’t need the red stilettos that were on her feet, she was almost taller than my father, a height that was highly sought after in models.

“Ah, Piper, it’s so nice to see that you’re finally home,” My father said smoothly when he noticed me in the room. I cringed at the word ‘home’; Sydney was in no way my home. My real home was back in Melbourne with my mother, with my friends. Sydney was a dream world in a way. It felt detached from reality, where you couldn’t buy a race car simply because you were bored one weekend or have the shopping complex open at 2am when you can’t sleep and want to go shopping because you are friends with million dollar owner.

“There is someone that I want you to meet,” my father said as he stood up from the couch where he was sitting beside the woman, “This is Meghan. Meghan and I are seeing each other and she will be spending a lot of time here, so I thought that it was important for you to meet her.”
I didn’t bother remembering the woman’s name. My father would soon get bored of whoever she was and she would be long gone by the time that I next I saw my father, in her place another just as willing bleached-blonde bimbo. I doubt that my father could even remember the names of the last five girls that he had ‘had a relationship’ with.

“It’s so lovely to meet you Pippa, I’ve heard so much about you,” The blonde woman said smiling in a sickly sweet way.
“It’s Piper,” I correct, as I gritted my teeth, “May I go now?” I asked turning more towards my father.
“Of course not, don’t be silly. Us two are going to sit down and have a nice girl talk,” My father’s girlfriend said beaming at me. My eyes widened at her a little, was she really serious?

“That’s a great idea, I’ll leave you to it,” said my father as he turned left the room. I didn’t get the chance to open my mouth and protest before he had disappeared.

“So,” I said, as I tried to think of something to say, “How long have you been dating my father?”
“Just over a week, it’s all happened so fast but I’m crazy about him, absolutely head over heels.” Yeah, crazy about my father’s money.

“Isn’t your head always over your heels?” I said instead. The blonde looks confused for a moment before she smiled at me.
“So do you have a boyfriend Pia?”
“It’s Piper. And no, I don’t at the moment,” I reply stiffly. Could this woman honestly not get my name right?

“Oh. I remember when I was your age; all of the boys were after me. Of course, I was more than happy to oblige most of the time,” she said giggling in a high pitch voice.
“I go to an all girl’s school,” I said as a way of explanation, all of a sudden, I was feeling very small and insignificant.
“Oh,” she said giving me a strange look and nodding her head a little. I gave the woman a perplexed look, did she think that I was a lesbian or something?

“Are you a model?” I asked. The women’s face light up, I could tell that she liked to talk about herself.
“People ask me that all the time. But I’m not actually. I’m a make-up artist for Vogue magazine. You know Pepper, I could do your make-up for you if you wanted, I’m sure that you could look really pretty if you knew what you were doing with your make-up.”

Who does this woman think she is? I was about one step away from punching her. All these backhanded slaps were pissing me off, not to mention her always getting my name wrong.
“Poppy, I was thinking that maybe you could stay at a friends’ house tonight,” The woman said to me in a soft voice as she held on to my hand. I had given up on correcting her about my name.

“Umm, why?” I asked, trying to move my hand away from her, I didn’t like it when she acted all fake affectionate, like she was my mother or something.
“Well, I’m staying here tonight and your father and I are going to ... want some time alone,” The blonde bimbo said not at all subtly.

Great, so now I couldn’t even stay in my own room; I knew that I hated Sydney.

“Look, I need to go, I’ll see what I can do,” I said standing up and running from the room before any more disgusting images could put in my brain. I did not need to know the details about what my father did with his girlfriend. I needed a distraction, a distraction from this woman who couldn’t get my name right and kept dealing out backhanded slaps, a distraction from the image that was now taking over all of the free crevices in my brain.

“Oliver,” I called as I walked towards the foyer where I was hoping he would be.
“Yes Miss Evan.”
“How do you feel about going shopping?”