by Jennie Jones
He was changing the subject, and she was happy to let him. Intimate? Ryan didn’t do intimate with Edie, so she’d better wipe that idea from her head. ‘I’m going home to Mum and Dad’s,’ she told him. ‘I’ll walk. But thanks.’ She ought to remember to thank him more often.
‘Want me to pick you up later from Burra Burra Lane?’ he asked.
‘No, thanks. I’ll ask Mum to drop me off in town. Got a few errands to run for the production.’
‘I’ll meet you outside Kookaburra’s and run you back here.’ He checked his watch. ‘Three hours?’
‘What are you going to be doing in that time?’
‘Working out how to build your stage.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’ She smiled. He hadn’t mentioned what he was going to do when he knocked down the back room in the barn and became homeless. He’d just shrugged last time she’d asked. Maybe he’d move back into Gemma and Josh’s place. He obviously didn’t want to stay in Edie’s house. ‘See you later then, and thanks for everything,’ she said again.
He left the kitchen and Edie dragged in a breath. What had just happened between them? Whatever it was, it had happened fast, but the argument was somehow different from any they’d had before. Something had ruffled him. She had asked why he didn’t like her and that was a dumb thing to have done. Unease made her stomach churn. She didn’t want him guessing that she adored him. She didn’t want to adore him. She didn’t want to look at him and imagine what it would be like grappling with him, his arms around her, her legs around him. Like, if he was holding her up against the wall while he pulled her clothes off, tearing her T-shirt in his hurry …
She slapped her hands to her cheeks. Stop with the images!
3
The Backdrop
Edie tramped over the paddock at the end of Jindalee House estate, swinging her bag. ‘Estate’ was a lavish term for a big house that looked old yet was only twelve years young. It was surrounded by nearly three hectares of undulating pastures and that was estate-like. Or maybe she was being too fanciful all round today. The gardens at the front and back were a mess of dandelions and wandering jasmine, and nobody knew what might be found beneath the knee-high grass. Edie would have to find time to attend to it all before the play opened, and before Ryan offered to do it.
She climbed a wooden cross-gate to jump off the top bar instead of opening the gate. She was freer of spirit when she was outdoors, but only here, in the Snowies. Walking through a park in Sydney didn’t give her the same sense of abandon.
As it was a good thirty-minute walk to Burra Burra Lane, she’d been making plans. Except Ryan kept popping into her head. More than usual, but they’d shared such an odd moment earlier in the kitchen, and she still wanted to know what he was hiding beneath that slow smile and easy gaze. Maybe it had been her imagination—and everyone knew how over-developed that was at times.
She jumped from the gate, landing sure-footed on the soft, dewy grass, and pulled her navy-blue cardigan around her as though the wintery chill from that night three years ago had snuck up on her and smothered the spring sunshine.
She’d come home for a brief visit between a production of a comedy romp, The Mating Game, in Sydney and a four-month tour with the same play.
The town’s snowplough was broken so the snowfall from two days earlier was banked on the steps of the wooden walkway outside Kookaburra’s hotel. Ryan had put the chains on his four-wheel-drive tyres and driven out to Burra Burra Lane to pick her up and take her to Kookaburra’s. As it was her last evening before she headed off, her friends were shouting her a leaving-again party.
She was tired and wanted to go home and Ryan obliged after she asked him nicely if he’d had enough too and could he kindly drive her to Burra Burra Lane. He stood immediately and said, yes, he was ready to go. He’d had a different expression in his eyes from the one he usually showed the world. His calm yet intense steadfastness had turned a bit glowy as he looked at her.
He’d tucked her arm in his outside Kookaburra’s and they walked carefully along the raised snow-covered walkway until they reached the steps to the road. The radiance of the hotel’s interior lights and the lamplight made the town look like a movie set, all wintery and wonderful. The bare branches of the claret ash trees on Main Street were lit up with hundreds of twinkling solar-powered lights. The snow lay like icing on a cake, glistening from the light of the moon.
Ryan stopped and turned to her.
He looked awkward instead of a self-assured, ex-Special Forces commander, but that glowy look was still in his eyes and he was focusing it on her. Her breath caught from more than the cold.
‘Edie. I hope this won’t be a shock. But I was wondering if perhaps we might try …’ He rolled his wrist, but didn’t take his eyes off hers. ‘Kissing.’
Her heart swelled. ‘Kissing?’ she repeated breathlessly. ‘You and me?’ It’s what she’d longed for and had dreamed about endlessly over the years.
‘Well, obviously you and me,’ he said, sounding baffled. ‘There’s no-one else on the street.’
She swallowed hard to get rid of the tickling sensation in her throat, and to force her heart back to where it belonged. ‘There’s no need to be snippy.’
‘I’m not,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m just saying. Do you want to kiss?’
‘Are you going to take that tone out of your voice first?’
‘Come on, Edie.’ He stepped back. ‘Make it harder for a man, would you?’
‘Okay, let’s kiss,’ she said fast. She wasn’t about to let this opportunity go.
‘The moment’s gone.’
‘No, it hasn’t.’ Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut? ‘I’m ready.’ She licked her lips and took a step towards him.
She was so close she was sure she heard his heartbeat. Or maybe it was hers, pounding in her head.
He looked undecided, his mouth firming, then relaxing. Then he tipped his head, and all Edie’s expectations and hopes multiplied.
They exploded when his mouth covered hers.
Their lips were cold but her body warmed instantly from his touch. He opened his mouth and everything inside her undulated, like water swirling in a hot spa.
Oh, lord, the smell of him. A hint of lime-scented soap, his breath like the apple cider she’d made him taste, and his hair like nutmeg shampoo.
He ran his tongue over hers and she had to grab hold of him to steady herself. At which point her foot hit a patch of ice and she slipped.
She gasped, arms flaying before she grabbed him again.
He skidded, knocked off-balance.
Bang—he hit the walkway. Bang—his head smashed against the lamppost.
‘Ryan!’ She skidded a bit longer then grabbed the lamppost, held her breath and stared down at him.
He squinted, grimacing, then put a hand to his head. ‘Christ, you’ve given me bloody concussion.’
‘It wasn’t me! It was the ice.’ She released the lamppost, slid on the icy patch for two frightening seconds then got her footing before she fell on top of him.
‘Back off,’ he said when she reached down and took hold of his arms, tugging.
‘I want to help you up.’
‘Let go,’ he insisted. ‘I can get up myself. Just back off.’
‘I’m sorry, Ryan. Does your head hurt?’
‘My head’s fine.’
Edie straightened, disappointment dripping through her. His male pride was probably hurt more than his head. ‘We ought to take you to hospital.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, pushing to stand. ‘I’ve taken worse than this and got through.’ Then his foot slipped on the same patch of ice Edie had skated on, and he landed on the walkway again, expletives flying.
Edie lifted her eyes to the moon. No point imagining how expletively physical and active they might have got later on. Not after this.
‘You’re a minefield, Granger,’ he said gruffly. ‘It’s more dangerous walking at your side than crossing a frontl
ine defence.’
‘I am not more dangerous than that!’
That’s when the argument started.
She couldn’t remember how they got onto the subject of her career. Maybe she said something about it—but she would never be able to remove the ensuing conversation from her mind.
He called her an actress. He said she was all fake and nothing real about her existed anymore. She called him a chauvinistic male who would never have any idea how to treat her.
He said other women thought he treated them just fine!
She said he ought to go back to one of them then.
He said he would. At which point, the tickle still in the back of her throat had thickened and almost gagged her.
Then he walked away—without giving her a lift back to Burra Burra Lane, after he’d been happily driving her everywhere all fortnight.
She’d turned, exasperation and distress engulfing her, and froze to the spot when she saw the keen expressions on the faces of almost everybody she knew peering out through the slats of the blinds on Kookaburra’s window. They’d witnessed the whole deal. The endearing romantic bit. The try-out kiss—the knockout kiss before she almost knocked Ryan out—and the bickering resulting in her being dumped.
Horrible memory!
Edie shook the recollection away and tramped faster over the paddock towards Burra Burra Lane.
Ten minutes later she strode up the driveway to the Granger home and most of the tumultuous feelings inside her settled as the house greeted her as though waiting for her, no matter how long she stayed away.
The burgundy metal roof glinted in the morning sunlight. She glanced at the far end dormer window, which was still her room. Pleasant memories engaged her senses as she mentally inhaled the smell of her bedroom and thought of its pale-lemon, flower-sprigged wallpaper, and the bright splash of the red rug on the wooden floorboards.
She ran up the steps to the verandah and pushed open the front door. It squeaked, like it was saying, ‘Hello again.’
Tension fell from her shoulders.
Years ago her mother had painted a mural in the hallway. A field of welcome with nodding tips of white gentian petals, everlasting daisies, cheerful yellow-headed billy buttons and tufts of green grass. The mural was faded now but Sammy said it was going to stay the way it was. Fading as each person grew a little older, or moved on—as Lachlan, Edie’s older brother, had done. Sammy said all their joys and their heartaches were in that faded mural, which watched them come and go from the house throughout the years: happy, sad, joyful, exhilarated—and beneath all that—always love.
Why couldn’t her brother Lachlan have felt that love?
His leaving the Granger family had hurt terribly but it rankled more than pained Edie these days. For some reason, Lochie never wanted to fit in as a Granger. Not since he turned sixteen anyway. He’d left at eighteen and although her parents sought him out and found him, he didn’t want to know them. Last anybody had heard he was living in Switzerland, dabbling as an artist or a potter or something. Sammy said Lochie had a lot of her mother, Verity, in him and that there was nothing anyone could do to change belligerence or make a person love another, even if they were family.
For a second Edie’s eyes smarted. It was the oddest sensation, standing in the hallway alone. As though she wanted to cry simply from feeling loved. She hadn’t had much of that over the last few years. Attention, yes, even adoration on occasions—from theatre-going fans and from directors and producers.
Her tears dried up instantly at the thought of one producer in particular. Marcus Buchanan.
She met him at an audition and he was going to cast her as the lead in a play he’d brought over from California with Buchanan Strike Productions. More powerful and sleek personality than handsome man, they got friendly because Marcus insisted they had a rapport and a sizzling attraction. Why wouldn’t she take him up on his offer? She was free. He was free. Boy—had she been wrong about that!
‘Mum!’ she called, walking towards the dining room.
There was no answer; the house was empty.
She plonked her bag down on the mahogany dining table and took out her notebook and a pen. The curtains on the bay windows were always drawn open and the dining room looked out onto the gardens. Her mum said it was their window on the world. Sammy said the curtains in this room need never be closed.
It was odd to refer to your mother by her first name, but it happened after Edie turned seventeen and began to search for something artistic to do with the rest of her life. While she figured it all out, her mother gave her the job of artist’s assistant and as her mother was so well known in art and design circles Edie got used to talking about ‘Sammy’. People still asked her how ‘Sammy’ was, and although Edie always thought of her as Mum, she was used to her being both the acclaimed artist everybody wanted to talk to and her mother.
It hadn’t taken Edie long to pull together all the reckonings about her future. Her ballerina ambitions went down the drain as she grew taller. At fifteen, she spent agonising hours each night, locked in her bedroom, balancing veterinarian medical books on her head in the hope she might stunt her growth so she didn’t turn out to be six foot five like her dad. She’d never get a boyfriend. Even Ryan was only six foot two and a bit.
Fortunately, she stopped growing at just over five foot ten.
Her ambitions to be a doctor ended almost as soon as she’d thought of it. She wasn’t partial to blood for a start. Her horse-riding championship aspirations had been nailed to the post when she realised that she wasn’t good enough. Viv was the rider in the family—and the veterinarian. Viv didn’t mind blood. She could look at gallons of it and not pass out.
Edie hadn’t been too devastated about her youthful desires not coming to fruition. Nothing much fazed her back then. Funny how things change, through circumstances. She missed the attitude she’d once had of sticking her nose in the air and enjoying life. But life always demanded so much more.
She sat at the table, picked up her pen and re-read the list she’d made late last night.
THE CREW
Director: Edie
Stage manager: Ryan
Producer: Edie
Publicity coordinator: Edie? (Need help!)
Set construction: Ryan, Josh
Set dresser: Edie, C-emma, Mum (time with Viv permitting)
Costume coordinator: Edie and Kate Knight (mostly Kate)
Hair and makeup: Julia Morelly and her wife, Susie
Edie bit the end of her pen. She loved her career in the theatre—and worried herself into shreds at the thought of losing it. Nobody in Swallow’s Fall knew about Marcus and neither did she want them to. But should she be doing this play again?
She’d first done it in a small theatre at a Sydney fringe festival a few months ago. There were only a handful of characters, and her two friends, Tony and Damien, who’d been in the original production, were coming down to Swallow’s Fall to play the bigger roles. Among her theatre circle, only Tony and Damien knew where she was—and her agent, but he was about to dump her because of Marcus spreading rumours about Edie being difficult to work with and not turning up on time. She’d lost two roles because of this, which had made her agent furious.
She should have thought about Marcus’s response before she wrote him into the play in the first place. She hadn’t named him but she’d changed the title to Who Shot the Producer and of course he’d known that Edie was referring to him. Where had her brain been? Wracked with acts of fictional vengeance, that’s where.
After discovering the truth about Marcus, whom she’d dated twice and had even kissed—which filled her mouth with an unsavoury taste every time she thought about it—she’d written the wife-cheating, slimy mogul into her play and killed him off with a horse hoof to the head before curtain up on Act I. To make doubly sure he was dead she’d had his groom shoot him.
She’d stopped short of having the horse stomp him to mush and cartilage because she n
eeded his dead body onstage for twenty minutes and nobody wanted a comedy with too much blood and gore.
She shuddered. What she’d written was too close to what had now happened to Viv and her horse. Had she had some sort of premonition? If so, she wished she’d also had an inkling that Marcus would take such vicious umbrage.
Surely he’d back down or back off soon. She hadn’t heard from him in the last month so he couldn’t know where she was, and maybe he’d returned to California. Good riddance.
She went back to her list.
Front-of-house bar: ask Dan Bradford. (Be REALLY persuasive. Need audience happy or drunk!)
Programme selling: ask Mrs Tam
Props coordinator: Ryan and Edie
Photography: Edie?
Lighting and sound design: Edie design and someone to crew
Bookings and tickets: Edie
Front-of-house management: Edie
‘Oh, lord, I’m everywhere.’ Was she really going to get all this organised in under six weeks? She threw her pen down. ‘This was such a dumb idea.’
‘What’s a dumb idea, darling?’
Edie spun around on her chair. ‘I’m a dumb idea,’ she said to her mother, rising to go hug her after Sammy pulled off her gardening hat and threw it onto an armchair.
‘What’s all this?’ Sammy asked, embracing her.
Edie forced a laugh as she looked down into her mum’s eyes. ‘Nothing. Being silly.’
‘Being worried?’ Sammy asked with a tilt of her head.
‘Me? Worried? When have you ever seen me worried?’
‘Since you came home.’
Edie tried not to flinch.
‘Hey, sis, how are you? Mum, I’m off.’
‘Viv!’ At the sound of her sister’s voice from the doorway, Edie moved from her mother’s hold and smiled at Viv who was in her wheelchair with her jacket on and her handbag on her lap. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked. ‘I’m here to keep you company.’
‘I’m going shopping with the girls in Cooma. I need a pair of trousers with a very wide leg.’ Viv grinned, indicated the space-boot on her left leg then wiggled her wheelchair wheels in a ‘look at my boot’ manner.