by Brandy Scott
DEDICATION
To my mum and dad,
for making me a reader
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
CHAPTER 1
Aimee took a slurp of pinot and tried to decide who she didn’t need in her life any more. There wasn’t really anyone. She loved her children, obviously; she and Nick had a great marriage, the best, even after a decade and a half. The cat was displaying worrying levels of incontinence, and the vet had started to make noises about ultrasounds and potential tumours, and don’t worry, there’s always chemo — for a cat? — all of which sounded hideously expensive, but the kids adored Oscar and besides, they could afford it. Sort of. She’d just hide the bills. She wasn’t particularly fond of her mother-in-law, but the woman was nearly seventy and riding on one lung, so getting rid of her seemed like a waste of a wish. Or a resolution. Whatever.
A letting-go exercise, Melinda had said. Bring a bottle, and something you want to be free of.
‘Something or someone?’ Aimee asked her friend, who’d already finished writing her own list, naturally, and was rummaging under the sink for more wine.
‘What?’ asked Melinda. A head of ginger curls popped over the kitchen bench. ‘Are you still faffing?’
‘I don’t really have anything to let go of,’ said Aimee. ‘I like my life just as it is.’
‘Lucky you,’ said Lou, from the other side of the dining table. She sounded tired. Lou was always tired. ‘I’ve got too many to fit. I’m going to need another piece of paper.’
Melinda gave a little snort as she opened a new bottle. ‘It’s supposed to be about self-improvement,’ she said. ‘Letting go of a bad habit, or a resentment. Something you don’t want to carry into the new year.’ She flicked the screw top into the bin. ‘I so thought this would be your kind of thing.’
Aimee doodled a small flower on Melinda’s pale wooden table top, then quickly rubbed it off. ‘I like the idea,’ she said. ‘I’m just . . . blank. Give me another minute.’ She pushed her glass across. ‘And another drink.’
The wine Melinda poured her came two-thirds up the glass. Aimee reached for it guiltily. She’d have to get a taxi, send Nick to pick up the car in the morning. God, would she even get one of Hensley’s three cabs on New Year’s Eve? Her husband was down at the river supervising the fireworks, a display Aimee herself had helped organise after an exceptionally wet December. ‘Don’t you want to come see?’ he’d asked. ‘After all your hard work?’ Aimee didn’t. She was happier being a long-distance observer.
The taxi company rang out without answering. Bugger. She should have booked one before she left home. Or they could have just done this at hers. Aimee would have preferred it if everyone had come over to her place, with her squishy sofas and multiple spare beds, furniture already battered so it didn’t matter if someone spilled something, where they could have all got proper drunk and just crashed out. And then her friends would still be there in the morning, and she could have made pancakes and big pots of tea, and they could have hung out all day if they wanted. ‘Aimee, Aimee,’ Melinda had said when Aimee suggested it. ‘You do actually have to leave the house, occasionally.’
Maybe that’s what she should wish for: a bigger life. Wider horizons. But Aimee had everything she needed right here in Hensley, much of it in this room. She smiled at her two oldest friends — cousin, technically, in the case of Melinda, although nearly everyone in this town was related to one another, if you went back far enough. The three of them had been a unit since primary school, despite the age gap: scrappy Lou, ambitious Melinda, romantic Aimee. Schemey, Dreamy and Trouble, Melinda’s dad had christened them. They weren’t an obvious fit, but out here you became friends with the people whose houses were closest and whose parents could tolerate drinking with each other.
Aimee gazed fondly and slightly pissedly around the open-plan kitchen, at Melinda’s pale skin and sinewy arms, the silk vest she’d said was Country Road but Aimee knew was designer. She smiled lovingly at the slight muffin top escaping Lou’s faded jeggings, which Aimee and Melinda had privately agreed were Not A Good Idea, but what could you say? They’d grown even less similar over the years, but they had the strongest friendship of anyone she knew. Aimee felt a little emotional just thinking about it.
‘Finished,’ said Lou, waving her little notecard triumphantly. Aimee reached into the middle of the table and pushed over a matching envelope. The stationery Melinda had supplied for their letting-go exercise was sorbet pink, its edges rimmed with gold, like something from a posh florist. Aimee wondered if she’d bought the cards specially. They looked very Melinda: expensive, exclusive and just a bit much.
‘So what did you put?’ Aimee leaned over. There was so much wrong with Lou’s life, bless her. Where would you even start?
‘Yes,’ said Melinda, leaning in from the other side. ‘What did you put?’
‘No,’ said Lou, covering her card. ‘Sorry. Private.’
‘I’ll tell you mine,’ said Melinda.
‘You don’t have to.’ Aimee doodled another flower. ‘We can guess.’
‘Can we?’ asked Lou. ‘I can’t.’ She pushed her chair away from the table. ‘What on earth do you have to let go of, Mel? You don’t have any shitty relationships or jobs you’ve outgrown. No ungrateful children. No bad habits. You don’t even have a junk drawer.’
‘Yes, but this is Melinda, professional superwoman,’ said Aimee. ‘It’ll be about adding things, won’t it. Achieving. Building on her empire. It’s only us mere mortals who have to cast off our imperfections.’ She caught Melinda’s eye. ‘Oh, come on, you’ve got an awesome year ahead, Mel, admit it. Raising a trillion dollars, expanding into America. Is world domination on the list?’
‘Ten million,’ Melinda corrected, leaning back against her kitchen bench — her award-winning kitchen bench, with its double farmhouse sink and a vintage coffee grinder salvaged from a country hospital and featured just last month in House & Garden. Aimee coveted the sink, but wasn’t sure about the six-burner stove. She’d questioned Melinda when she had it installed. Melinda didn’t cook. Melinda said she also didn’t care. Aimee admired that about Melinda. Aimee cared too much; everyone said so.
‘Although it might be more,’ Melinda was saying now. She smiled into her wineglass. ‘I don’t want to boast, but it does look as if we’ll be significantly oversubscribed.’
‘Ah, you can boast to us.’ Aimee put her pen down and picked up her glass. ‘We’re only teasing. You know we’re super proud of you.’ She smiled a little blearily at Melinda, the woman who’d taugh
t her everything from how to insert a tampon to how to parallel park. ‘To LoveLocked, Australia’s favourite success story.’
Lou leaned over and clinked glasses with them both. ‘To LoveLocked,’ she echoed. ‘And a fantastic new year.’
Melinda pushed the French doors open and led her friends onto the balcony. No matter how often she stood out there the view never got old, nor the private thrill that it was hers. The whole of Hensley lay spread before them: river whispering in a corner to the left; purple hills rising behind the town lights to the right. On the outskirts, uniform rows of vines stood in shadow now, imposing order on the landscape. Hensley was small, but it was wealthy. Wine money mostly, and finance, from bankers who’d earned enough to enjoy the dubious privilege of stashing wives and children in a desirable country town and driving two hours into Melbourne a couple of times a week. Twats, the locals called them: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in the city, Friday to Monday in the country. Melinda knew the drill well, although she no longer had to do the drive if she didn’t want to. These days, the meetings came to her.
‘Let’s get this done then,’ she said. ‘I’ve still got a party to look in on.’
‘And I want to see what kind of state Tansy arrives home in,’ said Lou. ‘I’ve told her half past twelve, and if she gets in a minute later, I’ll — well, I’ll probably do nothing. Or at least, nothing that will have any effect.’
‘It’s not getting any better?’ Aimee pulled a sympathetic face and handed Lou her wine.
‘Everything I say, everything I suggest, I just get called a hypocrite.’ Lou took a healthy gulp. ‘Drinking. Smoking. Eyebrow piercing. Driving across Victoria to a music festival with some guy who doesn’t have a last name. She’s even started —’
Melinda leaned down and fussed with a dwarf lime tree so Lou couldn’t see her smile. Lou had been the first one of them to get drunk, to get stoned, to lose her virginity. The only one of them to lie about her age and get a dolphin tattooed on her arse. Aimee had been too much of a rule-follower, Melinda too much of a goal-setter. The others still teased her about her vision boards and ten-year plans.
‘So I said, “If you don’t have enough time for hockey, you don’t have enough time for pole dancing.”’ Lou gave a little snort. ‘And it’s not a bloody sport, I don’t care what anyone says. Body confidence, my arse. Thirteen thousand a year for St Ursula’s and she wants to become a pole dancer —’
‘Aimee.’ Melinda used her boardroom voice to cut across the chatter. ‘Shall we get started? Did you bring them?’
‘In here.’ Aimee placed a large cardboard envelope on the table.
Melinda picked the folder up, examined it. ‘I thought they’d be in a box.’
‘There’s not much to them,’ said Aimee. ‘Quite frankly, you’re lucky I even found them. They were in the loft, behind the kids’ old dressing-up box. Next to the remains of a dead rat Oscar probably killed six months ago. Now that was disgusting, a pile of bones and fur with the stomach —’
‘Okay.’ Melinda just wanted this done now. She’d hoped the letting-go exercise would be meaningful, that the others would gain something from it, but the whole project had lacked the positive spirit she’d been aiming for. Lou was becoming cranky, as she always did when she drank too much, and Aimee wasn’t taking it seriously at all. ‘So let’s assemble them or whatever, and attach our cards. I want to let them off before the fireworks.’
The sky lanterns were surprisingly delicate: thin rustling paper attached to a wire ring, a miniature hot air balloon with a strange, industrial smell. Melinda blew into hers experimentally; the tissue parachute filled, then deflated.
‘Do we need to make a wish?’ asked Aimee, as she tied her notecard to the narrow wire.
‘No,’ said Melinda. ‘Just let your mind picture what you want to let go of. A really bold image, lots of colours, sounds. And then imagine all that bad stuff sailing off, into the sky, leaving you forever.’
‘Is that what they teach you on your leadership retreats?’ asked Lou. ‘Because it sounds awfully like the rubbish Aimee shares on Facebook. You could save yourself a fortune.’
‘Lou!’ said Aimee.
‘If you want to do it, do it. If you don’t . . .’ Melinda shrugged. Lou could stay exactly where she was, how she was; Melinda didn’t care. Except she did, of course. If she could change Lou’s life for her, she would. Fill her card with wishes for her friend, rather than herself. She tried sometimes. Lending Lou motivational books and recommending podcasts, inviting her to come and hear speakers in the city. Lou always refused, politely but definitely.
‘Hey,’ said Lou, smoothing out her lantern. ‘These have got your and Nick’s initials on them.’
Aimee shrugged. ‘Wedding madness,’ she said. ‘I even had our napkins monogrammed. We’ve still got stacks of those as well.’
Aimee’s wedding had been a lavish yet tasteful affair. Melinda and Lou were bridesmaids, in strapless dull black satin. They’d lined up along the vines with four flower girls, two pageboys and a ring-bearing labrador as Aimee and Nick recited their original blank-verse vows. The dinner after was less enjoyable. Melinda had fended off more than a dozen enquiries as to why she wasn’t getting married and whether she was scaring them all off, ha ha ha, before she finally snapped and told an elderly aunt that she had herpes. The rumour had got back to the only eligible man at the reception, someone’s cousin from Adelaide who’d been happily slow dancing with Melinda until his father tapped him on the shoulder and told him not to bloody go there, son. Melinda had spent the rest of the night propped against a trellis with a bottle of red.
‘So what happens now?’ she asked, emptying the last of a bottle from the same vineyard into a sticky glass.
‘We push the wire loop through the waxy candle thing,’ said Aimee. ‘Then light it. That’s the tricky bit. If you’re not careful, the whole thing will go up. Nick’s mother nearly lost an eyebrow.’
The sky was darkening, its velvet morphing from dark blue into black. They lit the little paraffin squares and saw the lanterns swell in response.
‘Come on,’ said Melinda, and they lined up along the edge of the balcony, three thirty-something women who’d been finishing each other’s sentences and keeping each other’s secrets for nearly three decades. You didn’t get to choose your family, and these women were hers. More supportive than her real family, anyway. And just as infuriating sometimes.
‘I do love you guys, you know,’ Lou said suddenly, into the silence.
‘We know,’ said Aimee.
‘I’m just a bit stressed out,’ said Lou. ‘Bloody Tansy is being impossible, and I can’t seem to —’
‘Shhh,’ said Melinda. ‘Let it go.’
‘Literally,’ said Aimee, wobbling her lantern.
Lou giggled. ‘I just want to explain why I’m being such a bitch.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Aimee. ‘We’re used to it.’ She blew her friend a kiss. ‘And we love you too.’
Melinda smiled. This was more like it. ‘Right then,’ she said. ‘All together. One, two, three.’
The lanterns rose slowly, drifting lazily on unseen currents. Lou was surprised. She’d expected them to shoot up and off like they had at the wedding. Or maybe she was misremembering that. Everything about Aimee’s big day, Aimee’s entire relationship, had seemed to happen so fast: one moment Nick was dating Melinda and the next he’d fallen for Aimee, knocked her up, proposed, married her and knocked her up again, all before Aimee was twenty-three. Lou had expected Melinda to be upset, but Melinda had just shrugged and said they were better suited, and wasn’t it great that Aimee had ended up with someone so stable.
Stable. What would it be like for life to feel stable, rather than a constant struggle? A never-ending battle against wilful teenagers and rising expenses. But it would all soon be worth it: the tight budget, the extortionate education. Two more years, barring unforeseen disaster. Two years until Tansy was off to university, with
a part-time job and a student loan covering her fees, and Lou would finally have her life back. Although she didn’t plan for it to be stable, exactly. The first thing she was going to do when Tansy was settled was travel. Spain, Greece, France. Finally having the overseas adventures the others had experienced in their teens and twenties while Lou was pureeing carrots and scrubbing baby sick off rented carpets. Her own midlife gap year. Lou couldn’t wait. Maybe she’d start a blog.
‘They’re not going anywhere,’ Aimee fretted.
‘Shhh,’ said Melinda. ‘They are. Be patient.’
Lou leaned over the balcony. To the left of them stretched the riverbank, where Tansy and the rest of the town’s teenagers were no doubt drinking and snogging and smoking shit they shouldn’t be. Beyond the river stood the vines that made the region so prosperous, two and a half hectares of which paid for Aimee’s four-bedroom house and allowed her to stay at home writing poetry all day, living in her imagination, which, Melinda and Lou agreed, was lovely, but might not be the healthiest thing. They kept a close eye.
‘See,’ said Melinda. ‘They just needed to get high enough.’
The lanterns were flying now, three tiny night-lights bobbing in front of the river that gave the valley its Goldilocks climate: not too hot, not too cold, but just right to keep half the town in Range Rovers and the other half picking for pocket money during the season. Lou used to pick grapes. She’d stopped when Aimee married Nick. Switched to strawberries and chestnuts. She didn’t need her best friend handing her a cheque.
‘So where’s the party?’ Lou asked.
‘Meadowcroft,’ said Melinda. ‘I’ve got a driver coming.’
Above the town, the first fireworks exploded to a muffled cheer. ‘Do you think you could drop me off?’ said Aimee. ‘I really shouldn’t be driving.’
‘Me neither,’ Lou admitted. ‘I don’t need to give Tansy any more ammunition.’
‘I’ll order another car,’ said Melinda, as a second round of fireworks went off, the sound echoing off the hills.
‘You don’t have to do that,’ said Lou.
‘It’s not a problem,’ said Melinda. ‘We’ve got an account.’ She pulled a phone out of her silky trousers and started to type.