Heart Of The Outback, Volume 2

by Margaret Way

  It was official—she had no will-power. She had sure proved that last night with Heath. So why bother pretending in the rest of her life? She was hopeless. Just as her mother had always told her she was.

  She ate and ate and ate until her stomach would hold no more, and then, with a bellyful of sugar, and a head full of guilt, Jodie rolled up into a ball on the love seat and cried.

  A ringing land-line phone woke Jodie at around one the next morning. Eyes half closed, she struggled to find the phone under her hastily discarded clothes on the table next to Heath’s side of the bed.

  As she sat up she realised her stomach hurt. It hurt like nothing she had ever felt before. She licked her dry lips to find the taste of chocolate at the edge of her mouth and then knew why. It was self-inflicted pain, all of it, self-medication gone wrong, so she deserved no sympathy. And even if she did, she was all alone, and would get none.

  “Hello?” she groaned miserably into the phone.

  “Jodie, doll, it’s Derek.”

  Now that woke her up quicker than any shrilly-ringing phone or sugar headache could. “Oh, my. Derek. Hello!”

  “I got this number from your friend Mandy. Hope that’s all right. Is it late there? I’m never quite sure how to figure out the time difference.”

  “No, it’s fine. And I asked Mandy to pass it on if you called. I’d heard you were back in London,” she said, caught between using her spare hand to rub her prickly eyes or her aching tummy. “I’ve been … living in between places for a little while now, but since you haven’t had your answering machine turned on I haven’t been able to let you know.”

  About her move. Or about Heath. But for that news she needed to talk to her mum direct. When the usually shy and reserved Derek didn’t offer to pass the phone to her mum instantly, fear created a trickle of sweat down her back.

  “Is Mum there?” Jodie asked.

  “Asleep,” he said, but the answer came too quickly, too nervously.

  Jodie felt her stomach drop away. Patricia was asleep. Had she had an attack? An episode? An outburst? Had she been sedated? And why now? Were the fates playing tricks on her? Did Patricia know that Jodie was in the process of making a life for herself? Did she sense that she might not be coming home?

  “How is she, Derek? Be honest with me. I can take it.”

  “Well, she has been a little upset of late.”

  Upset. Upset for most people would mean a bit of a frown. For Patricia it could mean a sit-down in the middle of a public place that could only be fixed by police intervention.

  “Upset, how?”

  “Well, Jodie, it is her birthday in four days, and I know that your return flight was not meant to be until just before New Year, but it would mean so much to her if you came home.”

  His story just didn’t feel right. Jodie looked at her watch. One in the morning, taking into account daylight savings, meant it was two in the afternoon there. “Wake her for me, Derek. I need to talk to her now.”

  She heard Derek’s pause. The last thing he would wish to do would be to go against Patricia’s wishes. Well, Patricia was going to have to come second for once.

  “Now, Derek. It’s important.”

  “Well, I would, but you see I can’t. She’s not here; she’s at the hospital.”

  Jodie’s aching stomach clenched so hard she thought she might be sick. Hospital? Damn it! Why hadn’t they called her sooner? She had done too much to get Patricia to a stable stage in her life for it to all fall apart again.

  “Okay,” she said, hearing the distress in Derek’s voice. “It’s okay, Derek. Look, go to Mum. Be with her. And tell her …”

  Tell her what? Tell her to snap out of it? To be the grownup? But Jodie knew that wouldn’t happen. Not like this. Not with Derek as a go-between. Not with her mother medicated up to her eyeballs.

  The time had come to sort out her life once and for all. If she really wanted to move on, move ahead, move into a stage of her life where she could really be her own person, and make her own decisions and be strong enough to stick by them, to love Heath as he deserved to be loved whether she would always be second-best for him or not, and to let him know it, then she had to clear away the cobwebs of the past once and for all.

  “Derek,” she said, loud and clear, making sure she had his full attention. “Tell her I’m coming home.”

  Early the next morning, Jodie took a big deep breath and called Heath’s sister Elena—the one person in Heath’s family that she knew was suspicious of her, even though Heath would never admit it.

  “Hello? Stop that! If you don’t stop that, I will come over there and … that’s better. Good boy.”

  “Elena? It’s Jodie,” she said once there was a pause on the other end of the phone. She was preparing herself to add “Heath’s wife”, when Elena spoke up.

  “Jodie,” Elena repeated. “Right. Well, hello.”

  Jodie heard it in her voice. Elena knew. Elena might well have been the one to have shown Heath her website in the first place, but she wasn’t at all happy about how that had turned out.

  “You’re calling about Christmas, I expect,” Elena said. “There’ll be those of us from the wedding and a couple of dozen extra in-laws and out-laws as well. But I don’t want you to think you have to put on some big spread. The rest of the Jameson clan will bring food, and all you have to do is sit back and let us show you how we do Christmas down under. Okay?”

  Christmas? Oh, no. Jodie ran her spare hand over her tired eyes. She was going to arrive in London three days before Christmas. With her mum on the verge of a spell she was preparing for the idea that she might not even be home by New Year.

  Home.

  She looked around the warm oak kitchen and out through the window across the red dusty plains. This was home. This faraway haven of peace and nature, of heat and flies, and, most of all, of Heath. This was her home.

  And she was about to leave with fair certainty that she would not be able to return in the foreseeable future for fear of men in rent-a-cop uniforms refusing to stamp her passport and locking her away in some dark cold room as they questioned her for hours as they did on those TV shows all about airline security.

  “This isn’t about Christmas, Elena. Sorry. Heath is out on a two-night cattle run, and I need to get hold of him quite urgently.”

  “Oh. Umm. He’s lost his satellite-phone thingy again, has he? Did he leave you a map of where they’ll be? The easiest thing would be to ride out and join them. If he’s only out for two nights you’ll be able to find him at a gallop within a couple of hours, I’m sure.”

  “I can’t ride.”

  “Oh. Stop that! Right now! If I have to count to three … One … Two … Good boy. Sorry, Jodie. You can’t ride? Are you okay? Do you need an ambulance? Are you hurt?”

  “No, nothing like that. I never learned.” But it seemed that if she ever came back she would definitely have to learn to ride a horse. Otherwise these outback Australians would never take her for one of their own. “Anyway, that’s not the problem. It’s just my mum, back home in London, she isn’t well.” Understatement of the year. “I must go back as soon as possible.”

  “But what about your temp visa?” Elena said. “I thought it hadn’t come through yet.”

  Her visa? Elena knew not only about how they had met but about her desire for a temporary visa? No wonder she had not warmed to her as the others had.

  A clock somewhere in the huge house chimed six in the morning and Jodie felt time slipping away.

  “It hasn’t,” she admitted, feeling that being forthright was the only way to win this woman over. “But even though I would give my right leg to wish it had, I am stuck. I have to go back to London right away. And I have to let Heath know. Elena, I don’t have anywhere else to turn. I need your help.”

  There. She had said it again. It seemed once she had jumped that hoop she could jump it again and again.

  “Right,” Elena said into the loaded silence. “Leave
him a note on the hall table and he’ll find it. Family tradition.”

  “Thanks, Elena.”

  “No worries. And I do hope we’ll see you back here for Christmas.”

  “From the bottom of my heart I hope so too.”

  As Jodie hung up the phone she saw a swirl of dust in the distance. It was her cab. That meant she only had minutes before she had to leave. Barely enough time to write a note three lines long, much less a note that could possibly explain why she had to leave so suddenly and how much she hoped she could come straight back. To him. For two years, or for ever if he would have her.

  Five minutes later, with a note propped up on the hall table, Jodie left.

  In the cab she kept her eyes forward, unable to allow herself to look back, as the sight of the large house with the silver roof and the horse fences, and stables and red plains and distant hills and eucalypts fading to a speck in the rear window might very well break her heart.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  TWENTY-FOUR-ODD hours later, Jodie stood shivering on the cracked pavement, looking up at the familiar red-brick block of flats as grey rain splashed down on top of her in great wet sheets.

  Not for the first time in the past twenty-four hours, she wished Heath were with her, his warm, gallant hand at her back, his broad shoulder to lean on.

  When she had boarded the British Airways plane the attendants with their eighties outfits and eighties haircuts had actually brought a smile to her face as they had made her think of Heath. By the time the plane had left the tarmac in Melbourne, the thought of returning to London had not frightened her nearly as much as the thought that she might not be able to come back to him.

  She had phoned Jamesons Run from Heathrow but there had been no answer, and there was nothing more she could think to say on the answering machine that she had not said in her simple note.

  With a grand sigh she walked the old grimy staircase up three floors, trawled the long front graffiti-covered balcony past a half-dozen other sad-looking flats and knocked on her mother’s plain brown front door.

  She heard noises from within. English noises. Clinking teacups. Coronation Street on TV. She shivered again and this time it had nothing to do with the cold.

  Finally, the door opened to reveal Patricia in all her glory—hair still fire-engine red, perfumed to sneezing point, and dressed as if she were about to sing cabaret, not as if it was a winter Wednesday at home.

  “Jodie! Darling!” Patricia cried out, giving Jodie great gushy air kisses.

  Jodie kissed back while trying to keep her luggage from becoming squashed in the crush. When she pulled back, she had a good look at the mother she had not seen in almost twelve months. Patricia was a good deal more tanned from all her travelling, and she also looked a good deal older, smaller, and a whole lot less intimidating.

  And for the briefest of seconds Jodie wondered what she had been fussing about all those months. And then Patricia became … well, Patricia.

  “You’ve put on weight,” she said. “Around the tummy. And you’re all freckled. When did that happen?”

  Jodie blinked at her mother and forced herself not to undo all the good the past year had brought her. She took a deep breath and channelled confidence from Lisa, poise from Louise, chutzpah from Mandy, and brawn from Heath.

  “It happened on my year in Australia,” Jodie said in a nice loud voice. “Well, it was not quite a year. Before rushing back here, to be with you, I had around eight days left before my visa ran out.”

  She dumped her heavy bags in the hall when nobody asked to give her a hand with them.

  “But how are you, Mum?” Jodie asked, watching carefully for signs of stress, overindulgence, and excessive exuberance, evidence that she hadn’t been eating properly, bathing properly, and sleeping properly. “Derek said you were at the hospital.”

  “Hospital? I was out visiting Tina Smythe’s new granddaughter in hospital the other day. But I am just fabulous, darling, now that you are here, and just before my birthday.” Patricia turned and pointed a bright red fingernail at her adoring husband. “Did you have something to do with this, snookums?”

  Jodie looked to snookums, who was sitting in a chair in the front room, mooning over his wife.

  “Well, you were moping so much on the cruise at the thought that she might not be home in time for your birthday.”

  Jodie felt a cold chill come over her as the pieces fell into place. “Have you been taking your meds, Mum? Have you been resting? If you’ve been overdoing it on all these trips you know how stressed you can become.”

  “Stressed!” Patricia pooh-poohed, turning away and heading for the comfort of the sitting room. “These trips have been like an elixir to this old girl. Which is why Derek has bought me, wait for it … a trip to Paris for my birthday! We leave the day before Christmas Eve.” Patricia spun around with her arms outstretched like a Broadway star awaiting her applause.

  Jodie looked from Derek to Patricia, dumbstruck. “You mean that you brought me all the way here, so that we could have an early birthday celebration before you go jet-setting off to Paris?”

  Derek’s smile slipped away and Patricia’s arms lowered, slowly and dramatically.

  “I thought you might be devastated to miss seeing me before Christmas, darling. I know how much you always loved our Christmases together. We thought this would be a nice surprise.”

  “Oh, rubbish!” Jodie slumped against the gaudy antique hallstand so as to keep herself upright. “I can’t believe I fell for it. I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming from a mile away, and, Derek, I can’t believe you stooped to her level! By my coming here I may very well have lost the most important thing that has ever happened to me.”

  “Your marriage visa?” Patricia spat, throwing the words at her as if she were talking about a particularly awful brand of pond scum.

  “You knew about that?”

  Louise. She must have heard it from Louise. Sweet Lou who, despite the little hints Jodie had given her about her childhood, would never have thought that Jodie hadn’t even told her mother the good news before telling anyone else.

  “You knew about that and you didn’t even call me? Write to me? Ask me?” And you wonder why I needed to go to such an extent to get away from you!

  But none of that mattered. Not now. Now what mattered was her life from this moment on. What mattered was that Jodie was no longer the mouse to be played with by the lioness.

  “No, Mum,” she said, staring Patricia down, “by coming here, I may very well have put indelible strain on my marriage. I left my husband behind, having to leave him a note telling him where I was as he was out of contact, all so that I could come here, to make sure you—”

  She jabbed a finger towards her shocked mother. “To make sure you weren’t about to have a nervous breakdown because you—”

  She spun about and stared down the barrel of her pointed finger at Derek, who was blinking furiously. “You intimated you were in a mad-flap panic about her health.”

  “Don’t blame Derek, darling. I wanted you here,” Patricia said, doing her best to pout adorably, which on a fifty-three-year-old woman with a home perm came across as ridiculous. “And he wanted me happy. What’s so bad about that?”

  “What’s so bad? The fact that I was not put on this earth to merely take care of your every whim. Whereas Derek made the choice to do so, and for that I will for ever be grateful.” She turned back to Derek with a shaky smile, lowering her voice and doing her best to show him she was not about to knock off his head.

  “But my choice is to stay in Australia with my husband, whom I love so very much it hurts me to be away from him. And now I have gone and stuffed everything up so very badly. Even if he does understand why I left so quickly, it is likely I will not be allowed back into Australia to be with him, since my visa is about to run out and as yet I have not been issued a new one.”

  Jodie moved to the front door and struggled to load herself up with her quickly p
acked together bags. “Is there something so bad about that?”

  “Nothing, darling,” Patricia said, all pouting behind her. “Nothing at all. You’re right. We were wrong. We have been terribly wicked. Let me know who to call and I will do all in my power to make them let you back in the country.”

  Jodie slumped beneath the weight of her mental exhaustion. “There’s no one to call, Mum. I broke the rules, and I will pay the consequences. Though I would love to blame you for evermore for it, I know that it was as much my fault for flying here at the first sign of trouble when I should have stuck to my guns and forced you guys to take care of yourselves.”

  She hitched her bags higher on her shoulder and headed for the door. “I’m leaving.”

  “Where are you going?” Patricia asked. “It’s pouring out.” “I don’t know. Louise’s?” Patricia glanced away.

  “The half-sister I never knew anything about? All those years when you told me that I had no one in the world but you. I would put money on the fact that you knew exactly where she was all this time. Those Christmas bonuses you received from jobs I knew you had been fired from months before. That was from the Valentines, wasn’t it?”

  Patricia’s eyes narrowed, and her shoulders squared, and Jodie felt her pulse quicken in response. What the heck was she doing, purposely rousing the beast?

  “No, sweetie, it wasn’t,” Patricia said, her face turning pink. “I was eighteen when I gave her up and I never knew what happened to her until I came home to find her letter. The money was from your father. Why do you think I spent it on trips to Chelsea and those ridiculous gardens? Because of your silly football club and your silly daffodils.”

  Jodie was speechless. There was just too much new information there for her to soak it all in—the quaver in her mother’s voice when talking of Louise, and the money that was from her father … She didn’t even have the heart to chastise her mum for calling her beloved football team silly.

  But then Derek held out a hand and touched Patricia gently on the back. “Pet, come now. Let’s all be friends. Now little Jodie’s here let’s do as we planned and have a little tipple and cheese and crackers for supper. Don’t go, love,” Derek said to Jodie. “Stay. At least tonight. And if we can get you on a plane tomorrow and back to your man, we will. I’ll even pay your way.”