The minutes ticked by. If Eve didn’t get here soon she’d miss it.
Eve felt as though she’d never get there. She’d been told she was mad to drive 1500 kilometres for the funeral of a man she couldn’t remember. Eve didn’t think she was mad, but she’d let herself down by not coming while her father was alive.
She’d blown it. She had always wanted to see the town her dad came from, meet the man who’d left when she was still in nappies, who she would only have recognised from the two photographs her mother kept for the girls. She hadn’t expected him to die before she got there.
Eve couldn’t remember him, the man who’d fallen for their mother, stayed long enough for two daughters to be born and then left, but she’d always wondered at the sadness in her father’s eyes in the photos. It was the sadness of a choice gone wrong, her mother had said, and those eyes suggested life hadn’t been smooth for any of them, at least not until he’d chosen to return to the world he’d abandoned for their mother. Mum had certainly seemed happy being single in the final years of her life.
Today Eve would finally meet the half-sister she’d never seen – though it would have been easier if Sienna had come too.
Another car and caravan passed the other way. The straight road was ridiculously narrow so she was getting good at slowing and moving half off the strip and onto the red dust at the side whenever a car – or, heaven forbid, a gigantic road train – passed, then swinging her all-wheel drive back onto the strip again.
Finally the ribbon of tar curved a little and a shimmer of white, sand or salt or maybe even water, winked in the morning light between two distant red sandhills. Eve glanced at her GPS hopefully.
Not a lot of talking from Irish Sean, the GPS voice. He’d let her down on the conversational side; no forks in the road. But that mirage had to be a lake surrounded by the red sand the town was named after.
Eve chewed her lip. She still had ten minutes until the funeral started, and there wasn’t long left to wonder what her half-sister, Callie, was like. She’d sounded upset but sensible on the phone, and in her mind Eve could still see Callie’s signature, the perfectly formed, girlish handwriting, added under her father’s on their birthday cards. So hopefully there wouldn’t be too much awkwardness between Eve and her father’s other family.
Was Callie like her mother or their dad? Imagine if she was even a little like Eve herself?
Eve snorted. Her mother had always said, ‘Eve is different.’ She guessed she believed her. And not just because she had no desire to be a doctor like her sister, and wasn’t obsessed with climbing to the top of her profession like their mother. Outside the birthing environment Sienna reckoned Eve’s favourite clothes designer was ‘Spur of the Moment’, and her life goal, ‘Whatever Comes’.
But Eve just loved her job – seeing the wonder in a mother’s eyes when she’d achieved the incredible birth of her baby. She remained convinced women could do anything if someone believed in them.
In her work she was the low-profile presence in purple scrubs at the back of the room, silent until needed, there to support women in harnessing their inner strength, and to keep them safe. Her job was to stay confident that the mother had the power of birth in her own hands – and Eve was confident of that.
And maybe, just maybe, this half-sister of hers would see the value in what Eve did too. But she was sending her love anyway, even if they weren’t kindred souls. She just kind of hoped they were.
A signpost offered a welcome, though no buildings appeared, then a small ruby-red sandhill, a slight rise, a few scrubby trees and . . . Eve sighed in relief. Was this the town?
Except for Quilpie, the town she’d passed through hours before, Red Sand township looked more substantial than any place she’d seen since Charleville eight hours ago. From what she could observe as she drove past, there was one short main street of shopfronts, a few boarded-up establishments, and one pub – a long, low verandah-clad building in the middle of the main street. ‘The Imperial Hotel’, its sign read, and Eve wished she’d seen it when it was her dad’s.
She spied the drunkenly askew sign to the cemetery, turned in through the peeling white gates and roared up a dusty track.
One helicopter and three light planes were lined up in a paddock opposite the cemetery, and the crowd of dark-garbed people under scrubby trees gave the instruction she needed as she pulled in behind the hearse and glanced at her watch.
She undid her seatbelt and sighed. Ten minutes late. Again.
There was a ripple of movement behind the trees at the edge of the gravestones, and the gathered mourners parted to allow a tall purple-fringed woman in a crumpled orange dress to hurry through.
Callie stepped forwards and lifted her hand until Eve saw her, changed direction and arrived in a little stumble of dust.
Eve awkwardly held out her hand. She was certainly not what Callie had expected. Callie glanced at her mother, who was blinking at the streaks of violet in Eve’s hair, then took the proffered fingers and shook hands while her gaze lingered on her new sister’s face.
As if driven by an unseen force, Callie’s other hand closed in as well. Somehow she knew her father would be smiling. She wasn’t sure what she felt, but it wasn’t coldness, and she noticed her mother squeeze her shoulder.
‘Hello, Eve.’ Sylvia Wilson held out her own hand, and to Callie’s surprise and probably everyone else’s, Eve stepped forward and hugged her.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’
Sylvia smiled sadly. ‘And yours, my dear.’
Eve blinked away tears. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t really know him.’
Sylvia stroked the coloured fringe from Eve’s eyes. ‘Then your loss is greater than mine, dear.’
The presbyterian minister coughed and the assembled mourners dragged their eyes away from the fascinating drama unfolding in front of them.
Twenty minutes later it was done. The boards were removed and Duncan Wilson was lowered into the ground.
Callie felt her mother’s fingers slip out from under hers as she bent to throw the first sod.
The red-earth wad landed with a horrid thunk on the lid of the coffin and scattered into marbles. Callie bit down hard on her lip as she bent down for her own contribution to ‘dust to dust’. She’d never thought about the words before and she didn’t like thinking about them now. Her hand stilled and she swallowed. Couldn’t do it. Eve didn’t throw a wad either.
Then it was time to go, and the three women stood in awkward unity to say thank you to the mourners.
Sergeant McCabe, new in town since Callie had left, was a tall tough-looking man in the blue shirt and dark trousers of the constabulary. He inclined his head and shook Sylvia’s hand.
‘My condolences. I’ll miss him.’ He patted Sylvia’s shoulder and nodded to Callie and Eve. ‘Your father was a larrikin – but the best kind.’
‘Your father was a good man. A character.’ Mrs Saul from the post office patted Callie’s arm as she moved past. She nodded at Eve. ‘He’d fix my roof any time the tin came loose and would never take anything for it.’
‘And he trained all five of my boys at pony camp.’ Mrs Saul’s daughter, Fran, sighed as she too patted Callie’s arm.
‘Don’t know who’ll organise our leg of the Desert Races this year.’ An old stockman shook his grizzled head as he ambled away, bow-legged, eager to put his disreputable hat back on his head where it belonged and secure his favourite bar stool at the pub.
Callie stood beside her mother and intriguing new sister as people filed past, each with an anecdote about how her father had organised or comforted or rallied around their needs or misfortunes and, with a swell of bitterness in her throat, wished her husband could hear the accolades for a man he hadn’t understood.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fiona McArthur has worked as a rural midwife for many years. She is a clinical midwifery educator, mentors midwifery students, and is involved with obstetric emergency education for midw
ives and doctors from all over Australia.
Fiona’s love of writing has seen her sell over two million books in twelve languages. She’s been a midwifery expert for Mother&Baby magazine and is the author of the nonfiction works The Don’t Panic Guide to Birth and Breech Baby: A Guide for Parents.
She lives on an often swampy farm in northern New South Wales with her husband, some livestock, and a blue heeler named Reg. She’s constantly taking photographs of sunrise and sunset and loves that researching her books allows her to travel to remote places
fionamcarthurauthor.com
MICHAEL JOSEPH
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa | China
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2015
Text copyright © Fiona McArthur, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Cover design by Nada Backovic © Penguin Group (Australia)
Text design by Samantha Jayaweera © Penguin Group (Australia)
Cover photographs by: Woman: Joshua Hodge Photography/Getty Images;
Background: Auscape/UIG/Getty Images; Plane: Bruce Miller/Alamy
penguin.com.au
ISBN: 978-1-76014-036-6
THE BEGINNING
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The Homestead Girls Page 25