‘We can’t just leave things like this. I know you didn’t mean what you said that night. You were drunk. I bet you don’t even really remember it.’
‘I remember everything.’
‘Good, because Lou’s trying to pin the blame on someone, and she’s got her sights set on me. I know I’m not her favourite person, but if you’d seen her at the hospital . . .’ Oliver’s voice strained on the other end. ‘She was out of line. You need to put her straight. You need to put her straight and come home.’
Effie scrunched her eyebrows together and shook her head. ‘She’s right, though, isn’t she?’
‘That’s not fair, Effie. You got out of the car. There was nothing I could have done. But you’re still my wife.’
‘A wife who was laid up in hospital who you didn’t even think to look in on.’
‘I did – I told you – but Lou told me to go. And even if she hadn’t, I was going away anyway, remember? I told you I had to go to Sorrento for work. I don’t have signal there.’
Effie shook her head. ‘You told me no such thing, and there’s no way you’d have stayed away just because Lou told you to. I was almost killed, for god’s sake. Any normal person would have cancelled the trip.’
Was she being unreasonable? She’d told Oliver that she didn’t love him, and that hadn’t changed, but would it have killed him to at least check up on her more?
‘Will you please just come home?’ He sighed. ‘We can talk this through. Where are you anyway?’
‘You don’t need to know where I am, and I’m not coming home. I meant what I said.’
‘Effie, will you listen to yourself?’
She looked down at the rocky ground. She felt broken, but she couldn’t run away from the truth anymore, and she didn’t want to. She remembered what her mum had said. She was an Abbott. It was what had made her press on with her walk to the creek despite the uneven terrain, and it was what had made her answer Oliver’s call.
She took a breath, squeezing her eyes shut. ‘I want a divorce.’
Oliver stuttered down the phone, and she hung up, her hands shaking. He was trying to win her round again, but even if he’d got her to change her mind in the past, this time she wouldn’t let him. She clenched her jaw and nodded to herself. She’d made the decision beforehand anyway – she wanted a divorce.
The overhanging tree provided some shade and she lay back, letting the hammock rock her from side to side. She was perfectly alone, and after a while, the buzzing of the cicadas went from being unbearable to oddly hypnotic. She looked up at the azure sky and sighed. In just eight months, her life had changed so much that it was barely recognisable, but at the same time her mind felt so much lighter.
What the hell do I do next?
Her eyebrows furrowed together at the thought, and she turned her head to look at the crystal-clear water trickling across the rocks.
I want to talk to Mum.
The thought wasn’t a surprising one. For years, Effie had thought that her mum simply didn’t care about her enough, but from the moment she’d opened her eyes in the hospital, Penny hadn’t left her side. She had a room set aside for her, and she’d been nothing but loving and supportive. Effie had seen a different side to her, a side she hadn’t seen since her early childhood. And now she wanted to find out why Penny had left it all behind. She looked at her watch. If she left now, she’d be back for lunch and the next dose of medication. She climbed down from the hammock and began the slow walk back.
If there was one thing that fitted with the original idea of a commune in Effie’s head, it was the firepit, but even that wasn’t what she’d expected. The large bowl containing the three-foot-tall flames wouldn’t have looked out of place in front of a five-star hotel.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, pointing to it as her mum’s neighbour, George, poked at the fire.
‘Isn’t she just? Eighty pounds of American cold-rolled steel right there.’ His Texan drawl emphasised each word, and even though Effie had no idea what he was talking about, he sounded immensely proud.
‘George is very talented,’ Penny said, sitting next to Effie and handing her a cup of tea. ‘He does sculptures for Burning Man every year too. He’s pretty big in his circles.’
Penny threw him a smile. She smiled at most people here. It was hard not to since everyone seemed so relaxed and happy, but the one she flashed at George was different. Effie remembered the way her mum had pointed out his sculptures, dotted around the place, with a sense of pride, and now she thought about it, her mum talked about him an awful lot – ‘George says this’ and ‘George thinks that’. His neck flushed red as he took the compliment, and Penny’s hand flew to her ear, playing with the dangling earring.
Oh, dear god. Were they flirting?
‘I’ll just go and . . .’ George mumbled, pushing his silver-grey hair from his eyes as he stood up. He left the two of them sitting on the wooden slab serving as a bench.
Effie cleared her throat and took a sip of tea.
‘What?’ Penny asked.
‘Nothing.’ She shook her head. She didn’t want to know about her mum’s love life. She’d been overexposed to it enough over the years.
‘You’re trying to guess whether I’m having sex with George, aren’t you?’
‘Mum!’ Effie spluttered into her cup, and her face blazed red.
‘Oh, come on. We’re both adults.’ Penny grinned.
Effie watched as he ambled his tall, broad frame over to his bungalow. She had to admit, he was handsome, but he was ancient compared to her mum.
‘Isn’t he way older than you?’
‘Ten years,’ Penny replied and looked over at him. ‘He’s nice, though, isn’t he? Kind too. I can trust him, and believe me, it’s an understated quality.’
Effie looked into the flames flickering in front of them. The crowd that had gathered for dinner had slowly dispersed, leaving only a handful behind. Everyone in the camp knew her by association, and over the last few days, nearly all of them had gone out of their way to say hello and welcome her. They’d all asked how she was feeling and whether there was anything she needed. It seemed that kindness was a universal trait here.
‘Yeah.’ Effie sighed. ‘I guess it is. I don’t know who to trust anymore.’
Penny stood up and wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. ‘Wait here. I’ll be right back.’
The disorientating feeling of not knowing who to trust had rocked her from the moment she’d woken up in the hospital. She looked up at the sky, sprinkled with glittering stars. The twinkling lights reminded her of pictures from a book about the universe she’d had when she was little. Her mum was lucky to be able to see this every night.
Spending time together had been nice. Really nice. Given how little they’d seen and spoken to each other over the last decade and how fraught their relationship was, it should have felt strange to suddenly be in constant close proximity, but it didn’t. It was easy and, she imagined, how a mature mother–daughter relationship should be. The problem was that it all felt too good to be true. She still didn’t trust her.
Effie turned her head and saw Penny step down from the porch of her bungalow, carrying a large hemp bag. She’d done everything she could to make Effie feel comfortable and at home. She hadn’t tried to push her into talking about what had happened with Oliver, but even still. She’d disappeared once, and she could do it again.
‘There’s something I want to show you,’ Penny said, handing Effie the bag as she sat down.
It was heavy as she pulled it up onto her lap. Penny crossed her legs again and turned her body to face Effie’s. ‘You need the big brown one.’
Effie opened the bag to see a bunch of big books and pulled out the largest one. Through the flickering orange glow of the fire, she saw the embossed golden lettering on the front: ‘Photo Album’. This must
be the bag of photos her mum had told her about. She opened it, peeling back the sheet of tissue paper. The images were familiar, and she remembered going through them with her mum years ago. She smiled at the photo of herself, sitting on a carpeted floor, her chubby legs splayed out in front of her.
‘I remember these,’ she said, flicking through the pages.
‘Look at the last page,’ Penny replied. Effie frowned, picking up on the apprehension in her mum’s voice.
She flipped over the heavy cream-coloured pages and looked at the image on the last page. She ran her fingers across the laminated sheet covering the black and white image and turned the album to sit landscape view on her knees. Her eyes scanned the grainy picture of a group of people hanging around a VW camper van, but she didn’t recognise any of them. Just as she was about to say so, she looked at it again. She hunched herself over the photo and tilted it towards the fire to get some more light.
‘Is that you?’ she asked, looking at her mum.
Penny nodded. ‘I was eighteen.’
Effie looked at the picture again. She’d always known how beautiful Penny had been. She’d seen plenty of pictures of her mum before, but this one was different. Penny’s sandy blonde hair was scooped across one of her shoulders, and her skin was bronzed. She was wearing a tight T-shirt and tiny shorts, standing on top of the van with her arms outstretched. A duffel bag was suspended mid-air, falling into the arms of the man standing on the ground. She had a look of radiance that Effie had never seen before.
‘You look great.’
‘I didn’t have anything to worry about back then.’
That was true. By the time she’d have celebrated her nineteenth birthday, she would’ve been pregnant already.
‘An old friend passed through not too long ago,’ Penny continued. ‘It was random, as most good things are. She’d heard about this place and wanted to check it out. That’s her, Annelie, there.’ She pointed to a woman in equally tiny shorts standing by the van. ‘We hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in twenty-five years, and of all the places in the world for her to come to, she came here. She sent the photo to me when she got back to Sweden.’
Effie went to hand the album back, but Penny shook her head.
‘You see this guy?’
The long, curved ring on Penny’s middle finger glinted in the firelight, and Effie’s eyes followed as her mum pointed to the man waiting to catch the duffel bag.
‘That’s Gabriel. Your dad. Although he hated the English pronunciation. You’d have to say it the French way, or he’d get moody.’
Her dad? Effie’s heart jumped as she looked at him again. He was standing barefoot with his back to the camera, the muscles in his bare back flexing against his brown skin as his arms outstretched to catch the bag. His thick, black dreadlocks hung down to the waistline of his shorts. For years she’d imagined what her dad must have been like. All she’d known was that he was African, and as Penny had told her once, too handsome for his own good.
‘I thought you said he was African?’ Effie frowned.
‘He was born in Cameroon, but he was raised in Paris.’
‘How . . . ? I mean,’ Effie stuttered, trying to put her feelings into words.
For the first time, her dad was a real person instead of an abstract one. If only the picture had been taken from the front, so she could have seen what he really looked like.
‘I know you must’ve thought I was holding back on information about him, but the truth was, I didn’t have much to tell,’ Penny said, picking at her fingernails.
Effie had only ever asked about her dad a handful of times and had realised from an early age that Penny was always reluctant to talk about him.
‘So what changed?’
‘Getting this.’ Penny nodded towards the photo. ‘What happened with you. Us spending time together. A lot of things.’
‘What was he like?’ she asked, tracing her finger across the outline of her dad again.
Penny puffed the air out of her cheeks and turned on the bench, stretching her legs out in front of her. Effie watched as she flexed her toes.
‘What was he like . . . ?’ Penny sighed. ‘Honestly? He was a heartbreaker. I knew it from the get-go. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and strong too, in that quiet kind of way. I’d never met anyone like him before.’
Effie looked at the photo again, trying to see the dynamics between her parents. Penny was laughing at something as she’d thrown the bag down to him, and she wanted to believe it was Gabriel who’d said whatever it was that had put that smile on her mum’s face. Gabriel. She tested the word out in her head.
‘He was a friend of a friend, and we met him in Marseilles. He was a street performer, doing acrobatics and things like that. Really talented too. He travelled around with us for a couple of months.’
‘Not very long, then,’ Effie said quietly.
‘No.’ Penny leaned over to look at the photo. ‘But it was long enough.’
‘Did you love him?’
‘Like mad. It was hard not to love him.’ Penny smiled. ‘He was exactly what I needed at the time, the complete opposite to everything I’d left behind. He was exotic, daring and adventurous. He was only a year older than me, but he’d travelled through most of Europe already.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Life, I suppose. We had fun together – don’t get me wrong. We shared an experience that I think only comes along once in a lifetime. And yes, before you ask, some of it was chemically induced. But nothing could have kept him in one place. If ever there was a case of itchy feet, he had it by the bucketload. We were a constantly changing group. People came and went. I couldn’t make him stay, and I never wanted to. We spoke about meeting up again, once I’d seen a bit more of France.’
‘And?’
‘I found out I was pregnant. We spoke on the phone, but . . . Well, he was only nineteen. Can’t blame him for not wanting to settle down.’
Effie looked at the photo again, and a flash of anger surged through her. He’d turned his back on her. On them.
‘I never saw or spoke to him again.’
For a brief moment, she’d thought the point of her mum showing her his photo was to tell her she knew where he was and how she could contact him. She closed the photo album and put it down on her lap. She’d grown up thinking she was the product of a drug-hazed bunk-up. Penny had always been open about what she’d got up to, and she never had any details to share about Effie’s dad. Instead, the opposite was true. Even though they’d only been together a short time, she’d loved her dad.
‘I’m sorry,’ Effie mumbled. She didn’t have a clue what she was apologising for, but she did feel sorry.
‘Whatever for? Having you was the best thing I ever did. Okay, so it might have been the final nail in the coffin with Mum and Dad, and I had to be a single parent, but I wouldn’t change it for anything. Not even a lifetime of being with Gabriel.’
Effie blushed and looked down at her feet. Her mum had never told her that before. She’d always assumed she’d been a burden, getting in the way of the carefree lifestyle her mum had always craved. Wasn’t that why she’d left?
‘Having you made me a stronger person. I learned how to rely on myself and to trust people.’
‘I don’t see how it could make you trust people. Surely it would’ve done the opposite?’
‘When you find yourself pregnant by some lovable rogue you hardly even know, you learn to accept help where you find it. Being a single parent isn’t easy. You have to let people in; you just do it in a different way.’
‘Did you never try to find him?’
‘It wasn’t like it is now. We didn’t have mobile phones or Facebook, and he’d made his decision. The lifestyle he lived wasn’t compatible with children. He moved around too much.’
‘But yo
u did it,’ Effie said. ‘Look how many times we went away and moved around.’
‘Don’t tell me you enjoyed it,’ Penny scoffed. ‘Because I know you didn’t.’
Effie grinned. ‘No, you’re right. I hated it.’
It had always felt like they were constantly packing and unpacking, making a home in a new place and meeting new people. She frowned and looked at the flickering flames. Her mum was cut from the same cloth as her dad. That was why they’d never stayed in one place for too long, until Effie had started secondary school. Penny always had to be on the move.
‘I was born with a strong sense of wanderlust,’ Penny said, ‘but I did try to calm it down. We stayed in Kennington for ages, didn’t we?’
It had barely been four years – hardly ages.
‘Is that why you left, because of me?’
Penny shook her head and put her arm around Effie, squeezing her arms. ‘Of course not. Why would you think that?’
Effie shrugged. ‘You said it yourself: I hated moving around all the time. I must have got in the way.’
‘I left because . . .’ Penny sighed. ‘Well, I suppose I left because you simply didn’t need me anymore. You were completely independent. You always had been. You could take care of yourself. You’re my daughter and I raised you, but you were never really mine. I don’t own you, and I never have. And you were always so vocal about hating the way we lived, I suppose I thought it was for the best.’
‘But you just upped and left. How could it have been the best for me to come home from school and find you gone?’ Effie fought to keep the anger from her voice as she remembered the day she’d walked back to an empty house to find a wad of money and a note in place of her mum.
‘I know, and I’ve always regretted that. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, and I wish I could take it back. If I’d done it differently, maybe you wouldn’t have ended up where you have. When I met Oliver’ – she shook her head – ‘I knew he was a bad egg. I could see how vulnerable you were with him. How much you wanted to be normal.’
Penny said it like it was a horrible-tasting thing in her mouth, and Effie grimaced because she was right. The lifestyle Oliver had offered her was all she had ever wanted, her chance at the fairy-tale ending.
Love You Better Page 28