‘Sorry about the mess.’
Isla smiled, noticing he’d changed into jeans and a t-shirt that hugged his broad shoulders as she buckled in. A jacket was slung over his seat. ‘You never were a tidy Kiwi.’ As he reversed out of the drive and onto the High Street, she felt a frisson of panic. What if they had nothing to say to each other? It was a forty-minute drive to Greymouth, she hoped it wouldn’t feel much longer. Conversation was never a problem between them in the past, they used to talk about anything and everything, and he always made her laugh. That was years ago though, and so much had happened since. She cast a furtive glance at him. He looked relaxed as they drove past the pharmacy and the Four Square. His big hands, which he’d obviously just scrubbed clean, were holding the steering wheel loosely, his fingers tapping out the beat of the song playing on the radio.
Isla leaned back into her seat as they left Bibury behind and gazed out of the window up at the hills cloaked in bush, rearing up on either side of the road. The ground would be thick with ferns and mosses she knew, thanks to many a school tramp. Glancing up at the Nikau palms she could visualize the climbing vines dangling from them, giving the bush a Jurassic feel. She hadn’t appreciated the beauty of it all when she was a kid, dragging her heels and moaning along with the rest of her classmates. She hadn’t appreciated a lot of things when she was younger, she thought with a sideways glance at Ben.
‘How was life in London?’ He kept his eyes on the road ahead.
Isla felt her nerves dissipate as she began to talk slipping back into the easy feeling of being in the company of someone you’d once known well. ‘I guess it became home for a while.’
‘Ten years.’
‘Yeah, ten years,’ she echoed. ‘I had some good times and some not so good times towards the end.’ She shrugged. ‘There’ll be things I am going to miss and some things not so much.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, my good friend, Maura, for starters. I miss her already, but we won’t lose touch, Skype’s a beautiful thing. Then there’s the theatre and the museums, all the cultural stuff. But I won’t miss the queues and disgruntled commuters.’
‘Not much call for a queue in Bibury but what’s wrong with the Bibury Players and their annual show at the Town Hall or the Miners’ Museum if it’s a bit of culture you are after?’ He raised an eyebrow and smirked.
‘Have you been overseas?’
‘Yeah, I have. I had a glance round Australia and a good look at Asia. I love Vietnam. The food there’s great, and the people are fantastic but home’s home, you know?’
‘I’m beginning to know, yes.’
He shot her a quizzical look.
‘So, Dad told me you’re dating the school’s new secretary.’ It shot out of her mouth before she could stop it, and she squirmed in her seat. Now he’d think she had been asking after him. The fact that she had was neither here nor there.
He kept his eyes on the road, but Isla thought she detected a slight flush to his cheeks. ‘Yeah, I am. Her name’s Saralee. She’s a nice girl, you’d like her.’
No, I wouldn’t, Isla thought. Her name had instantly conjured up the apple pie she’d dug into the night. She managed to unclench her teeth. ‘Yeah, I’d like to meet her sometime.’
That quizzical look again. ‘I’m sure you will, Bibury’s not exactly a metropolis.’
The silence stretched out, and Isla wished he’d turn the volume up on the stereo or something but he didn’t. ‘What about you? Were you, or are you still with someone over in London?’ It was a fair enough question, tit for tat. Isla took a moment before she replied, ‘I was, it was serious, but then it all went rather pear-shaped.’
‘Is that why you came back?’
‘It’s not the whole reason, but it was a contributing factor. I suppose I’d just got to a point where I wondered what I was doing it all for.’
‘Your job you mean?’
‘My job, my relationship, none of it seemed that important anymore.’ Isla looked out the window seeing but not seeing as she found herself back with Rita in that light and airy room with the picture of the peace lily and the giant sequoias.
Break-Free Haven Lodge
Isla rolled off the beanbag onto all fours, feeling her knees protest at the hard floorboards beneath them. She blinked the tears, sitting, waiting to fall away and imagined what Toad would say if he could see her now with her leisure-pants-clad bum sticking up in the air. It pleased her to know that she didn’t care what he thought anymore. The relationship had been over for a long time, she’d realized since coming here, and she’d grieved for it while she was still in it. She’d come to Break-Free and had broken free from him. She was also rapidly concluding that there was a lot to be said for leading one’s life in leisure pants and being out of the corporate rat race. Optimum stress-free comfort at all times, for one thing. She got to her feet and stretched. ‘I’ve just got to get a drink of water, Rita. Would you like one?’
‘No, I’m fine thanks.’ She gave a wave of her hand. They both knew Isla was stalling.
Isla poured herself a drink from the cooler and sipped it slowly. She’d known she would get to this part in her story eventually. The part where she had to be honest with herself. That, after all, was why she was here, sitting on a beanbag in California. She drained the contents of the plastic cup, dropping it in the wastepaper basket before flopping back down into her familiar seat.
‘Better?’
‘Yes thanks, I’m not used to talking this much.’
Rita smiled gently. ‘I think you’ve got a bit more to do yet. Why don’t you tell me why you were frightened at the intensity of those feelings you had for Ben?’
Isla squirmed on the beanbag. She’d never told anybody about all the complicated emotions she’d had swirling around inside her back then. Not even Ben, it would’ve felt far too disloyal.
‘It’s okay, take your time honey.’
Rita, Isla fancied, looked the way an older and much wiser sister might. She’d be the sort of big sister who wouldn’t steal her stuff or make fun of her, she could trust her, she decided. So she began to talk.
‘I used to look in the mirror sometimes, and I’d see my gran looking back at me. I take after her with my olive colouring. People say we’re peas in a pod. Mum’s the complete opposite. She got her looks from Granddad’s side of the family. They’re both amazing women, my mum and my gran. I can see that now but as a teenager their lives, well, they just seemed so small and confined.’ Isla’s voice trembled and Rita passed her the box of tissues she kept to hand on the chunky wooden coffee table.
She accepted the box and blew her nose before continuing, ‘Gran grew up in Bibury. She got married young, had her family and joined lots of committees and well, that’s it. Then, my mum grew up and got married, had two kids and when we were old enough, she started work at the local pharmacy. She’s still there, and Gran’s still on loads of committees. When I’d look in the mirror back then, I could see my life playing out the same way as theirs if Ben and I stayed together. I didn’t want what I saw then as a little life like theirs. I wanted a big, exciting, high-flying life.’
Isla exhaled, she’d admitted how she felt out loud, but this wasn’t how she’d expected to feel having finally owned up to a fear of following in her grandmother’s and mother’s footsteps. She’d thought she would feel unburdened, cleansed maybe or at the very least validated over the way she’d felt. Apart from feeling knackered though, she felt no different whatsoever. No, that wasn’t quite true. Talking about how naïve she’d been and knowing how her own so-called big life had worked out for her, she realized she felt sadder than she had before.
‘So, your relationship with Ben made you feel trapped?’
‘Pardon?’ She blinked to try and dispel the trance-like feeling that had settled over her.
‘I asked you if your relationship with Ben made you feel trapped.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ She rubbed her temples. ‘My brain feels al
l weird and mushy.’
‘That’s quite normal.’ Rita smiled serenely, clasping her hands in her lap and Isla couldn’t help but think that she would be just as at home in a new age Yurt keeping an eye out for UFOs somewhere in Arizona.
‘Yes, and no. It was a case of push me, pull me. I knew that while he was in my life, I would have felt the pull to go back to Bibury, no matter how big the push to get away was. Ben’s life was already mapped out for him. He wanted to work for his dad in their family business and eventually take it over. Everything he wanted was already there in Bibury, and it was everything I didn’t want.’
Rita’s expression did not flicker, and Isla wondered if learning how to control your facial muscles was part of the training you had to undertake to become a counsellor. ‘Did you ever talk to him about how you felt?’
‘No.’ Isla looked down at her hands and began to pick at a hangnail by her thumb. ‘Mostly because it felt so bloody selfish to feel like that. Him, all our friends, they were all happy with their lot it was just me that had this incredible need for more.’ The skin around her thumbnail was an angry red now, and it had begun to throb, but at least she could feel it hurting.
Isla frowned as she stared out at the sequoia trees outside standing tall and proud. Common sense told her now that leaving Bibury was all part of growing up and finding her way in the world. It was a rite of passage she’d had to undertake, and for the most part, it had been fantastic. She’d worked in a business she loved; she’d travelled and gotten to see and do fabulous things. She’d met some fantastic people along the way too. Of course, she’d met some not so fantastic people along the way as well. The shine too, had been slowly rubbed off her love of design with the pressures of deadlines always looming.
‘So, you moved to Christchurch.’ Rita interrupted her train of thought.
‘Yes, Art was always my thing. I enrolled in Polytechnic and graduated with a Diploma in Interior Design after which I began working in the city. I threw myself into my job, and I was good at it too, really good at it because I loved what I did. To take a blank space and transform it into someone’s dream home was such a buzz. I even won an award for one of my home design ideas.’ Her visits home during this time had gone from fortnightly to monthly, and even that felt too frequent. It was hard going back. No one got the new Isla; she’d moved on from her friends who’d left high school but hadn’t left Bibury. Worst of all she couldn’t get to her gran’s house without passing by the Robsons’ garage either, where Ben had done what he’d always planned on doing and joined the family business. Try as she might to not look, her eyes would always slip towards the forecourt in the hope of a glimpse of him.
She’d hear things from time to time too. Things like what he had got up to at the Pit on a Saturday night with the girl who was there with a group of city friends on a hen’s night and her stomach would twist. It was like a form of torture. Okay, yes, it was her that broke it off, but it didn’t make it any easier to hear that in her absence he hadn’t entered the priesthood. What she needed was to get far, far away and then opportunity had knocked.
‘I was doing well on the local and international design scene, and I came to the attention of the company I work for now. They offered me a great package to relocate, and so I got on a plane and flew to London.’
Oh yes, she’d embraced living in one of the world’s foremost cities wholeheartedly and the years had simply rolled over one after the other until suddenly they totalled ten. It was the anonymity of the crowds she loved. The seamless blending into the to-ing and fro-ing of people leading their lives without worrying about what it was she was up to in hers. She didn’t even mind the daily tube ride that her colleagues always griped and moaned about. Okay, so she hadn’t been all that enamoured by the heavy breather she’d been wedged in front of that time. Or the leerer who’d just about nosedived into her top when the train had stopped suddenly. It was street theatre or rather tube theatre. It was all part of being somewhere bigger than, well, Bibury. She’d felt, as she rode that tube each morning, as if her real life, the one she was meant to be leading, had finally started.
‘And you know the rest of the story.’
Rita nodded. ‘So we’ve come full circle Isla.’
‘Yes, I suppose we have.’
‘So I’m going to ask you again, where do you see yourself going from here?’
Isla thought about how she’d been living this last year. She’d lost her zest so to speak and sitting here now, she felt empty and rather alone. It had been a long time since she felt connected and part of the lives of the people around her. Faces floated before her, familiar faces, lovely faces that she missed desperately and suddenly she knew with absolute clarity where she needed to go. ‘I’m going home Rita; it’s time for me to go back to Bibury.’
Isla rubbed at the steamy patch her breath had left behind on the passenger window and then turned her attention to the left-hand side where she saw the Tasman Sea thrashing ashore the pebbled beach. They were heading into Greymouth, passing by the well-tended gardens of the old weatherboard houses. ‘That’s new,’ she said placing her mind firmly back in the here and now as she pointed to the Aquatic Centre with a blue hydro-slide snaking out of the side to her right.
Ben grinned over at her. ‘Yeah, it’d be a few degrees warmer than Bibury Area’s old pool. Do you remember that time we scaled the school fence and went for a midnight dip?’
Isla laughed. ‘And Mr Hannigan from across the road marched over in his pajamas waving his flashlight around, telling us he’d ring both our parents if we didn’t get out and go home pronto!’
‘It was down to your squealing we got busted.’
‘It was freezing!’
They smiled at the shared memory and then she recalled what had come next when Ben had warmed her up with his kisses as they sat in his old Ford. She turned her attention to the passing panorama of houses lest he read where her mind had wandered.
A few beats later, before the silence between them could get uncomfortable, Ben flicked the indicator and said, ‘There’s a good yard near the Monteith’s Brewery, I thought we could check that out first.’ He swung the truck off the state highway.
‘Sounds like a plan. I’m in your hands.’ Oh dear, why had she said that, she thought as she received another of his quizzical glances.
Chapter 11
An hour later, Isla was the proud owner of an ‘06 red Mini Cooper; it cost her far more than she’d planned on spending, but she was smitten. ‘I’ve always wanted a Mini, especially a red one,’ she declared spying it in the carpark and making a beeline for it. She hadn’t known this was her dream car until she spotted Delilah as she’d already named her and a magnetic yearning dragged her in for a closer look.
Ben was frowning, he’d been about to steer her in the direction of a much more practical, in his opinion, and price friendly Toyota Auris. Once Isla had gotten behind the wheel of the Mini though, he’d known by the look on her face that she wasn’t going to budge. He’d managed to get the price down for her though, and made sure the smooth young sales guy had known that he knew a bit about cars. She’d always been a girl who knew her mind, he’d thought, exasperatedly watching as she headed off to the office to put the finance into place.
Swinging her keys, she came out of the office ten minutes later all smiles. Ben was leaning up against the bonnet of his wagon. ‘Have you got time for a bite of lunch before we head back? My treat,’ she called out.
‘I never pass up a free lunch.’
They wound up in a funky café that had, to Isla’s delight, whitebait patties on the menu despite the season not being until mid-year. August was when the long serving whitebaiters would stake out their territory in the local rivers to catch the tiny silvery, baby fish as they made their dash up the river. She’d steered well clear of Tainui Street, where the pizza restaurant she and Ben had gone to on their first date was. It was probably long gone by now anyway, but she wasn’t running the risk of
driving down that particular memory lane.
‘Yum, whitebait patties in buttered white bread with a squeeze of lemon is the best,’ she mumbled with her mouth full. ‘Is your steak okay?’
‘Yeah, it’s great thanks, medium-rare just how I like it. You know I never really got the whitebait thing. I mean they look like tadpoles.’
‘Thanks for that, I’d forgotten you didn’t like them.’
He grinned. ‘I liked going whitebaiting with Grandad when I was a kid though; it was my job to pick out the ones that were too big to make good eating. He used to tell me stories and he told me once his father came out from Scotland in search of the gold he’d heard could be found here on a ticket he won at the horse races. Imagine the course of your life hanging on a horse race? If the horse he put money on hadn’t won that race then the generations that followed, including me, wouldn’t have existed. Weird thought aye?’
Isla nodded. ‘I remember that horse race story. I grew up hearing from Gran about how hard a life it was when she was young with everything being done by hand. Ugh, and they had an outside dunny. It wasn’t for the faint-hearted. But Ben, I said it years ago and I’m saying it now, you can’t call yourself a Coaster if you don’t like whitebait. It’s programmed into our DNA to love the stuff.’
‘Not mine, and I can if you don’t tell anyone.’
She grinned. ‘What’s in it for me?’
‘I won’t tell anyone, meaning your dad, what you paid for Delilah out there.’ He indicated to where she’d pulled up outside the café. He’d parked his truck a few cars down from hers. ‘That’s a terrible park by the way, any further out and you’d be stopping traffic.’
Sweet Home Summer Page 9