BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
by
Jenny Todd

       For many years now I have done my shopping in Camberwell. You can get everything there including fresh fruit and vegetables and gourmet deli items from the Market. After shopping I like to go to a coffee shop for a latte. For a long time my preferred place was the Bookshop Café – the front part of the shop, the part that opens onto Burke Road, used to be a bookshop, but that gave way long ago to an optometrist. Still, Optometrist Café somehow doesn’t have quite the same ring.
       The coffee at the Bookshop has always been excellent but they have no magazines there and I like to read something when I am on my own. They do have the newspapers, of course, so, since I get The Age delivered each day, I find myself reduced to reading the Herald Sun. Sometimes it has gossipy items that don’t find their way into The Age. On this occasion, many years ago now, the café was half empty when I went in and I settled down with my coffee and the Herald. I was reading an item about a down-and-out in America who had just won untold millions in a lottery, and was dreaming about what I would do with such a windfall, when a woman’s voice cut across my reverie, ‘Do you mind if I share your table’? I was surprised to see that the café had filled up completely and the only available seat was the chair opposite me.
       Her next words surprised me. I thought she must have been a mind reader because she tapped right into my train of thought. ‘Be careful what you wish for. You might get it’.
       She looked down at her coffee, a small frown creasing her forehead. After a few moments she began to speak again. ‘I had a daughter’, she said. ‘She was my only child. We would have loved a large family, but it was not to be. We considered ourselves blessed to have her. We named her April Joy, because she was born in April and she brought us such joy. She was a beautiful baby and we adored her. She grew to be a very talented young lady, good at her school work, good at sport, played the saxophone in her school jazz band, all that sort of thing’.
       She was silent, the frown back between her brows, gazing down at her latte.
       ‘We were so proud of her. In our eyes she was perfect. If she had any fault at all it was that she was a bit headstrong’.
       She glanced at me.
       ‘I suppose we spoiled her’, she said reflectively. ‘We could never refuse her anything. She was so… winning’.
       There was another pause while she sipped her coffee.
       ‘She finished school with a shower of honours and prizes. She achieved a brilliant HSC pass and was accepted into the Law School at Melbourne University where she did a double Law/Science degree. She loved her university years and lived them to the full. She sailed through her studies. When she graduated she was snapped up by the biggest law firm in Melbourne.
       ‘She was soon earning the sort of salary that I could only dream about but she was very ambitious and never quite satisfied. She fell in with a particular group of people in the firm. They were all senior to her, on large incomes, hard-living and without responsibilities. They liked to frequent the races and the Casino. She took to going along with them and betting rather more than she could afford. When her losses began to mount up she started buying lottery tickets.
       ‘One day her number came up and she won $200,000. It doesn’t sound much today but in those days it was a great deal of money. We urged her to pay off her debts and invest the rest in blue-chip shares like BHP, but all the others in her crowd had holiday houses and it was too important to her to keep up with them. So she bought a beach house at Mt. Eliza and a sports car, a Porsche’.
       The pause was longer this time and the crease between my companion’s eyes deeper. When she spoke again her voice was quieter and I had to stretch my ears to catch her words.
       ‘That wretched car. Two weeks, that’s all. She had that car for just two weeks. And then, on her way to Mt. Eliza one Friday night, she went off the road and into a tree. She was killed outright’.
       Her voice dropped even lower and the only word I heard was, ‘… waste’.
       The silence was palpable. Not knowing what to say, I said nothing. When she looked up again her eyes glistened and her smile was crooked.
       ‘Be careful what you wish for’, she said again. ‘You might get it’.
       I couldn’t meet her eyes. I looked down at the newspaper article. When I looked up again the woman was gone. Glancing round the café I noted with surprise that it was half empty, as it had been when I first went in. I ran out after her. I wanted to say something, to express my sympathy, but she had vanished. I walked slowly back into the café and ordered another latte. The newspaper still lay open on the table, the article staring at me like a reproach. I folded it quickly and put it back in the rack. Her words came back to me as if from a great distance.
       ‘Be careful what you wish for. You might get it’.