Inside, he flicked a switch and the lamps poured warm yellow light over the panelled interior: floor, ceiling, walls, all the same honeyed wood. He had a few books here, a box of CDs for the tidy little inbuilt sound system, and his old acoustic guitar, which always lived on the boat because nowadays he only ever played for himself, company on a quiet night, a workout for his fingers. There was a small armchair – a legacy from Paddy all those years before – a built-in day bed, a cooker, sink, fridge. A tiny bathroom – shower, sink, the compromised lavatory that kept Katelin in Edinburgh – and an only-just-double bed, built on a raised platform, with a porthole which by daylight framed a ritzy stuccoed villa facing him on the opposite side of the canal.
Dan took a beer from the fridge, flipped the lid, then sprawled across the sofa and – as he often did, these days – permitted himself the luxury of thinking a while about Alison Connor: the girl he used to know, not the woman she’d become. Alison sprang so easily to mind now, after all those years of absence, and when he closed his eyes he could see her clearly in 3D, a perfectly formed hologram girl in his Sheffield bedroom, where most of their hours together had been spent. God, she’d meant all the world to him when he was eighteen. He’d thought they’d break out of Sheffield together, grow up together, live their lives together, raise funky children with a proper appreciation of music together. When she went – bleak, bleak day, the day he realised she’d gone – she put him into a state of pain so dark, so deep, that he didn’t properly start to heal until he found Katelin four years later in Bogotá. Alison Connor. The smell of her hair, what was it? Just shampoo and Sheffield, probably, but Christ, it was good. And her laugh! Making Alison laugh was the best, it was payday, because she was such a grave and serious girl, as if all her life she’d been wary of fun. She’d fitted into his family life like a hand into a fucking glove; then she’d left them high and dry. There’d been some competition back then for whose heart was in worse shape, his own or his dad’s. Bill had retreated to the pigeon loft for days, and nobody’d believed Alison wasn’t coming back.
Dan drained his beer and sat up. He needed a song for Ali and he knew now what it was going to be. Frank Ocean, ‘Thinkin Bout You’, a slow-burn, beautiful, intimate torch song from R&B’s new wunderkind. Dan copied the link, and pasted it on the growing thread he shared with Ali.
There you are, Alison, he thought. See what you make of that, all the way across the globe, down under in your Adelaide bedroom. He binned his empty bottle and thought about going to bed, then at the door there was a tap-tap-tap, a looming shadow, a hesitant voice. ‘Ahem, Dan? All well in there?’
Jim.
Dan sighed and hung his head. ‘Yes, Jim, fine. You OK?’
‘Oh, tickety-boo, but since you’re still up, I’ve some Lamb’s Navy Rum, fancy a tot?’
Dan unlocked the door and opened it, intending to say no thanks, early start, train to catch. But there stood Jim, hope like a light in his eyes, a bottle in one hand and two enamel mugs in the other.
‘Haven’t seen much of you,’ Jim said. ‘Haven’t seen a soul all day, in fact.’
So Dan smiled and held open the door. ‘Can’t be having that, Jim,’ he said. ‘Come on in.’
12
QUORN,
17 NOVEMBER 2012
Sheila put two strong flat whites down on the table in the tiny courtyard garden of the Quorn Café.
‘Right,’ she said, sitting down opposite Ali. ‘Time to spill.’
Ali added sugar to her coffee and stirred – her habitual delaying tactic in such situations – then she looked at Sheila.
‘You can’t share this,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t. Even with Dora. At least, not until we leave.’
Sheila nodded. ‘Understood.’
Ali sighed. ‘Stella’s pregnant,’ she said.
Sheila, to her credit, didn’t wince or grimace or miss a beat. ‘Ah, right, so that’s it. I see.’
‘We’re not discussing it, unless Stella wants to,’ Ali said. ‘This trip’s a temporary escape.’
‘Yes, well, this town’s perfect for that,’ Sheila said.
It was, thought Ali: a perfectly preserved little frontier town in the back of beyond. Right now, Stella was off with Ali’s Nikon, taking arty shots of the disused rolling stock on the train tracks, and the faded, filigree grandeur of the Victorian shop fronts. The sky here seemed bigger and emptier than in Adelaide; the sun blazed, unhindered by cloud, on to the tin roofs of the houses, and the heat shimmered and danced above the surface of the roads. It was shady right here, though, under a plane tree in the café courtyard; and a bubbling water feature, a beatific cross-legged stone Shiva, supplied the sound – if not the sensation – of liquid coolness. Now and again, a resident pair of sulphur-crested cockatoos left their leafy perch to dip their beaks into the pool of water in Shiva’s cupped hands.
‘Does she want to be pregnant?’ Sheila asked now.
‘She says so,’ Ali said. ‘But that might only be because Thea’s loudly insisting she has an abortion.’
‘Do you know the boy?’
Ali shook her head. ‘Nope, Stella won’t tell us. It was just the once, apparently.’ Tears sprang to her eyes, and she groped blindly in her bag for a tissue. ‘God, Sheila, I feel such a failure.’
Sheila pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and passed it across the table. ‘Alison,’ she said.
Ali took the hankie, wiped her eyes, blew her nose, sniffed disconsolately. ‘What?’
‘Your success as a mother isn’t in doubt here.’ She pointed at Ali’s cup, still full, untouched. ‘Drink some coffee,’ she said. ‘It’s excellent. And don’t heap blame on yourself.’
‘Hard not to,’ Ali said. ‘I feel I took my eye off the ball. I’ve been so distracted lately, I do feel I’ve let her down.’
‘Stella’s going to be just fine,’ Sheila said. ‘She has the same beautiful determination as you, and Lord knows you had a far worse start.’
Ali looked hard at her coffee and Sheila said, ‘Oh, sweetheart, we never talk about your life in Sheffield, do we?’
‘No need,’ Ali said, glancing up, then down again.
‘Catherine gave you such a difficult—’
‘Sheila, why are we talking about this?’
‘Because we never have, and there’s something on my mind. When you came to see me all those years ago in Elizabeth, and I didn’t know that you didn’t know Catherine had died, and I just blurted it out like a fool – well, you were like stone, you didn’t even cry, and I wish I’d—’
‘Sheila, please. We were talking about Stella.’
‘There must still be a lot of unshed grief there …’
‘No,’ Ali said with a firm authority that brought the older woman to a sharp halt. Sheila knew nothing, nothing, about Ali’s life in Attercliffe, the fear and the shame, the dread of scandal, the horror that she might be pitied, the endless efforts at damage limitation that were part of the daily routine. ‘No, there isn’t a lot of unshed grief, and we’re going to fall out, Sheila, if you keep pushing me on this. I’m sorry to snap, but you know nothing about it. Catherine was an extremely sick woman who held life very cheap.’
Sheila, not in the least offended, gazed at Ali with a most unwelcome empathy; then, in a portentous tone that made her heart sink further, she said, ‘Well, anyway, I’d like to say one thing more, and it’s this. I let you down very badly when you first came to Australia.’
‘No, I’m not having that,’ Ali said, thinking: This is all so long ago, so far away. ‘I had Michael by then, we came to see you together, remember?’
But Sheila wasn’t listening. ‘I was poor Catherine’s oldest friend,’ she said. ‘And that gave me a kind of responsibility towards you, but I was nearly crazy with my own unhappiness at the time.’
‘Listen, Sheila,’ Ali said. ‘If there’s one thing Catherine taught me, it was to take care of myself. I didn’t come to you looking for help, we were just visiting.’ She had no
wish to be dragged backwards into the distant turmoil of Sheila’s unhappy marriage, or the whys and wherefores of Catherine’s death, the details of which had travelled to Sheila via her own mother, back in Liverpool. And no, Ali thought, she hadn’t cried when Sheila broke the news, she’d only thought thank God that’s over, because Peter would be free.
Ali knew she was right: Michael had been with her; he’d driven her up there. But he hadn’t been party to that conversation, and she hadn’t told him afterwards either, because this was her Year Zero, the very start of their marriage, the sparkling, clear-cut early days when she’d reinvented her life so completely it was sometimes hard to recognise herself. And oh, how Michael had hated that visit – Sheila and Kalvin’s little house, the smallness of everything, the cheek-by-jowl ordinariness. He’d spent most of the time in the garden pretending to study the herbaceous border. When Ali came outside to find him he’d said, ‘Thank God, now let’s get the hell out of Dodge.’
Now, Sheila reached for Ali’s hands and clasped them tight, and for a few moments Ali submitted to the searching intensity of her gaze, until a young woman in a denim apron approached their table from inside the café and saved her.
‘Hey,’ said the waitress. ‘How you goin’?’
‘Great, thanks,’ Ali said, tugging her fingers free from the emotional urgency of Sheila’s grip.
‘Good to hear. Can I get you ladies anything to eat?’
‘Ah, no thanks,’ Ali said.
‘Yes, we’ll have some raisin toast, Megan,’ Sheila said. ‘We’ve had a heart-to-heart here, and we need the sustenance.’
‘Raisin toast for two?’
‘Oh no, none for me,’ said Ali.
Sheila said, ‘Raisin toast for two, Megan darling,’ and she winked at the waitress, who smiled and raised her eyebrows at Ali in a sort of helpless apology before turning from them and going back inside. Ali looked at Sheila and said, ‘Sustenance? We already had Dora’s special honey granola today.’
‘I know, but there’s something about you makes me want to feed you up,’ Sheila said. ‘Also, I’m terribly greedy.’ She laughed and slapped the top of the table, making the coffee cups bounce in their saucers and scaring the cockatoos; they flung themselves upwards, and their beating white wings were huge and quite startlingly beautiful against the hard blue sky.
Over dinner that night, Dora proposed a trip north, two hours’ drive, maybe a little less, up the outback roads to Wilpena Pound. It turned out Dora could fly a plane as well as drive a train, and there was a Cessna she could borrow; she could take them up for a bird’s eye view from the little airfield out there.
‘It’s not my plane, it belongs to Clancy,’ she said, as if this information clarified everything.
‘Nephew,’ Sheila explained, and Dora nodded.
‘That’s right, so will I give him a call?’
Ali wasn’t sure: she thought it all sounded irregular, if not actually illegal, but Stella just said, ‘Awesome,’ and Sheila was already dragging the Esky from the cupboard under the stairs to give it a wipe down inside. So Dora rang Clancy, and very early the next morning they set off in Ali’s car, the Esky packed with bottled water in case, Sheila said, the car blew a gasket in the Never Never. The town was still sleeping as they left it behind, and the sun hung tremulously low on the horizon.
‘Whack up the heat, sweetheart,’ Sheila said. She was wrapped in a voluminous alpaca wool poncho but still she complained about the chill, and it was true there was no heat in the day yet. But the new morning sky promised much; pale and clear, it seemed freshly rinsed. A perfect day, Dora said, for flying.
‘You wait,’ she kept saying to Ali and Stella. ‘You wait. It’s just the most incredible sight.’
She was in the front with Ali, and Sheila was with Stella on the back seat. The atmosphere was jolly, no mistaking it; like a school trip, Stella said – like the Year 6 surf day at Aldinga Beach. Their road north was straight and true, an unwavering ribbon of asphalt unfurling through the ancient landscape, and the miles rolled easily by as the golden farmlands of the southern Flinders began to change into something else entirely, a dry and dramatic vista of red desert scrub: saltbush, bluebush, mallee. Stella snapped pictures of incurious kangaroos through the open window of the car, and once they had to stop as a ragged line of dusty emus jogged across the road ahead.
‘This,’ Stella said, ‘is so cool.’
‘Outback colours,’ Sheila said. ‘A palette of rust and ochre.’
‘Well, I meant the emus,’ Stella said. ‘And the roos.’
Ali looked for Stella in the rear-view mirror, and winked. Stella’s amusement sparkled, like sunshine on water.
They reached the airfield soon after eight, and Clancy was waiting for them there, leaning against his Cessna, a middle-aged ocker, a Victoria Bitter kind of guy: early-morning stubble, bit of a beer gut, weathered bush hat, khaki combats, faded denim shirt. He grinned and waved when Ali’s old Holden estate pulled up in front of the wire fence.
‘G’day, ladies,’ he said when they got out. He tipped his hat and cast a bold, appreciative eye over Ali and Stella and said, ‘Well, the scenery just got heaps better,’ so Ali folded her arms and held his gaze, as if to say, I’ve got your number, mate.
‘And it’s bonzer timing,’ Clancy said. ‘You’re getting up there early before the easterlies blow you to buggery.’ He opened the door of the little plane and then watched them clamber up. ‘Barge arses up front, for ballast,’ he said, slapping Sheila on the rump. ‘Sexy arses in the back, and, Dora, I need it back this arvo so don’t get lost.’
Dora rolled her eyes and said, ‘Rough as bags,’ but she blew him a kiss as he slammed the door; then he gave them a thumbs-up and stepped away from the plane, holding on to his hat as Dora, unlikely though it seemed to Ali, took the plane down the runway and lifted it competently up, up and away. Now they had to yell to make themselves heard, but almost immediately they fell silent, giving up on conversation to stare down in a sort of wondering humility at the receding earth, as the little plane banked effortfully up and over towards the extraordinary serrated crown of Wilpena Pound. It rose from the earth, a primeval amphitheatre of proportions so majestic that the landscape it stood in seemed dwarfed by comparison. The sun, higher now in the cloudless sky, drenched the jagged mountain ridges with a preternatural glow, and as the Cessna followed the jagged ellipsis of the pound, tracking its monumental outline, Stella snapped picture after picture; then she spun round to Ali and tugged at her sleeve and said something completely inaudible into the roar and racket of the labouring engine.
‘What?’ Ali shouted. Then again, louder, ‘What?’
Stella leaned in closer. ‘I said: bonzer views,’ she shouted, and perhaps it was the altitude that made them light-headed, or the alien beauty of planet Earth, or the coruscating blue of the sky, but they started to laugh and couldn’t stop, and Sheila, twisting round to look fondly at them, smiled in recognition of that feeling: the ecstasy of mirth.
Afterwards they drove back as far as Hawker, then stopped for an early lunch in the bar of a small hotel, where Dora seemed to know almost everyone they encountered. Sheila said this was how it always was with Dora; it was as if she’d lived a dozen lives so that she need never be lonely. She’d had husbands too, so had garnered networks of extended families who’d loved and lost her. She was Dora Langford now, having reverted to her own surname when she met Sheila, but once, way, way back, she’d been – albeit briefly – Dora Franklin, one of the Franklins, the Franklins who’d established a sheep station in the 1840s and made a mint out of merino wool. For a couple of years Dora had had pots of money and all the conferred cachet of an early settler’s surname. Then she’d ditched her Franklin boy and married William Tremblath, the ruddy-cheeked descendant of a Penzance tin miner.
‘Wow,’ Stella said, enthralled. ‘Dora Tremblath!’
‘That’s me,’ Dora said, coming back to the table from the bar with a bottl
e of good white wine in an ice bucket, and a Coke for Stella. ‘I mean, it was me.’
‘Two husbands and a wife, Dora,’ Ali said. ‘Good going.’
‘Three husbands, actually, sweetheart,’ Sheila said. ‘There was that opal miner in Andamooka.’
‘Oh, shivers, so there was,’ Dora said. ‘Crikey, I forgot about him.’
She sloshed wine into three glasses and pushed one across the table to Ali and another to Sheila, who raised hers and said, ‘Girls on tour,’ and they all four lifted their drinks and clinked. Around them, the bar was filling up: tradies, truckers, tourists. The barman appeared with their food order, burgers and fries, and Stella clapped, eyes alight with glee. ‘Coke and a burger,’ she said. ‘Beatriz would chuck a berko.’
‘She would,’ Ali said. ‘And so would your dad, if he could hear you talking like that.’
‘Speaking of the mighty McCormack,’ Dora said to Ali, ‘weren’t his family wool barons from Burra way?’
‘Copper, then wool,’ Ali said. ‘But, obviously, way before my time.’
‘Is there a lovely big sheep station somewhere up there, then?’
‘Oh, you bet,’ Stella said, jumping in. ‘With a huge house and its own chapel, where all the McCormacks got married, until Dad and Mum broke the rules.’
Dora looked at Ali. ‘Do tell,’ she said.
‘Oh, well, we married quickly and very young,’ Ali said, stripping her words of all possible drama.
‘They married overseas,’ Stella said. ‘Mum was only eighteen, weren’t you, Mum? They met and married while they were travelling. God, this burger is so good.’
‘Oh, Michael’s mother was so angry.’ Ali picked up her glass and took a cautious sip of Riesling, and it was so cold and clean, she wanted to knock it straight back, the way Sheila and Dora were doing. But she had to drive in a straight line to Quorn, and even if either of them were offering to drive – and they weren’t – she couldn’t let them now. Dora had already drained her own glass, topped it up, then topped up Sheila’s. They were each going at it as if the wine were water.
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