Nicky Malone had always been a dedicated follower of fashion, especially in the hair department. She felt that it helped her maintain her professional image if she had fashionable hair to maintain. She liked to keep a reasonable mane of hair just below shoulder length. That gave her enough volume to play around with regarding styles and cuts.
She also loved the advent of acrylic nails - no longer having smudges that went too far up the finger and no more chipping on the ends of the nail. And there was an endless supply of patterns pre-painted on the nails, enabling her to reflect the changing seasons as well as her fashion tastes for colour.
All this meant that she had a regular appointment at Justine's each week - Thursday mornings. She never like to wear the same nails for more than three weeks, but each week there was a bit of filing and in-filling to do as the nail grew. Sitting there having someone pamper her nails was such a treat - almost meditative. Candy always had new ideas for nails she had seen in catalogues, and of course, Nicky had no budgetary limits for the nails. Candice was also good at the meaningless chatter that passes time in a salon.
Somehow the conversation got onto the topic of new houses. Candy desperately wanted to be independent of her parents and have her own place - but the options for her in Quarabup were rather boring, and definitely limited. Nicky remembered some of her stories selling real estate in Perth. "I had a customer like you once. She had left school and was doing clerical work while she studied Business at TAFE. Her home was filled with noisy brothers and all she wanted was a place of her own - but she never seemed to have enough money to cover rent, which was at a premium because of the mining boom."
"Yeh, I don't feel like I would have enough left over after I paid rent - but maybe if I shared with a girlfriend we could manage together." Candy sounded less than convinced that she could find a friend who would be prepared to share with.
"Well, one weekend her folks won Lotto - big time. I mean really big time! They decided that they would build a new place near the beach, and then renovate their old place so that she could stay there - maybe with a mate from school, if she wanted, and what her mate paid in rent would be her income."
"I would love to be in a place where everything is new, but I suppose that will have to wait." Candy was at least a little bit realistic about these things.
"We're thinking about a new place," offered Nicky quite casually. "It's going to be down by the water so I want to have a nautical theme - inside and out. I really like those places with the stainless steel railings on their balconies. We're going to have that, and around the pool."
"What are you going to have a pool for if you're right by the beach?"
"Well, it won't be a beach really, when we live there. It'll be a canal." As she uttered that last word, Nicky realised that maybe she was letting too much out. She hesitated a little and then tried to minimise the damage. "Well, that's what I want - if we can find a place like that."
Salon gossip is a funny thing. Most of the time it is treated a bit like a church confessional - what is said in the salon stays in the salon. It is actually very important to maintain the confidence of your customers. If they found that their innocent prattlings were being passed around the community for other purposes, they wouldn't be want to spend their money in your salon again.
But Justine, who unintentionally drifted into consciousness of that last little bit of Candy and Nicky's conversation, couldn't help wondering if it confirmed her worst fears - that Sam Malone really was in cahoots with Spandos. Justine had been quite active in the group organising community opposition to the Canal Proposal, and they had always suspected collusion, if not corruption. This seemed to prove it. But what could she do? If she told the rest of them and Nicky worked out that it had come from the salon she would lose a very good customer.
Perhaps she should sleep on it. She didn't want to lose this opportunity but she couldn't betray the trust of her salon.
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