‘There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable,’ Nancy would tell Alice. She liked citing Mark Twain after baking something decadent, but Alice was wise to the double entendre. Nancy had used the quote when first telling Alice about Teresa, and how then, when the forbidden no longer satisfied, the pair had fantasised about ways they could be together as a couple. Nancy had never dreamed their fanciful plotting would be anything other than fiction, making do with their clandestine meetings and finding an odd satisfaction from fooling everyone. Teresa had wanted more. So, early one morning, bursting with nervous laughter, the pair sneaked out, as planned, with Teresa behind the wheel of Nancy’s car, the Holden’s high beam piercing the darkness at a terrifying speed, and flimsy plans mingling with fancy dreams of a charmed city life. Nancy had been giddy with excitement. Someone had tempted her, rescuing a country girl from a life she wasn’t meant to live.
As Nancy reached out a hand, resting it on Teresa’s knee, their gaze met for a split second, matching smiles a reflection of utter elation. They were finally free to be together, free to be themselves, free to love. The car’s headlights caught something up ahead. Teresa slammed her foot on the brake, the car nearly colliding with a ute parked across the narrow dirt road leading out of town.
‘Tim?’ Nancy uttered her husband’s name in disbelief.
How did he know? She and Teresa had been so careful with their planning. How, after a half bottle of Bundy and a dutiful romp in bed, could he have woken in time to see them leaving in the black of night? Sex was usually more effective than a sleeping pill to Nancy’s husband. He couldn’t have managed to be in front of them now, unless he’d cut through the Lawson property. There was only one road out of town and one way he could reach the turnoff before them. Perhaps ploughing down the Lawson’s fences accounted for the smashed headlamp on his ute.
Tim Brown’s eyes squinted through the oncoming headlights, daring the charging Holden like a wounded bull.
‘Hang on,’ Teresa screamed the order while yanking the steering wheel hard left, their car stopping short of dense roadside shrubbery.
Nancy was first to clamber out of the vehicle, then out of the ditch, on her knees, pleading. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have talked to you first.’
‘Get out of my way,’ Tim yelled, kicking Nancy back to the ground. ‘You and your sick girlfriend make me want to puke. I found your pathetic little hiding place with its candles. All those disgraceful romance books. You think I’m stupid? You think I didn’t know what was going on in that shed?’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Nancy was standing now, but so weak with fear a small shove sent her stumbling back into the culvert behind the Holden, bone-dry earth coming off the spinning wheels as Teresa, in the driver’s seat, tried desperately to free the car from the ditch. Minute specks of grit and stones shot out, firing into Nancy’s face to graze her cheek, her neck, her shoulder—sandblasting her eyes and momentarily blinding her.
‘I’ve prayed for you, Nancy. I’ve prayed God would cure you. But not even he can help someone so disgusting. Go ahead. Slink away and live your sordid little lives together.’ He tried one rear door before storming around the back of the Holden to try the next.
Locked!
Nancy had checked before driving away from the house, because at eighteen months the babies were old enough to play with the handles.
The babies!
‘I’m so sorry,’ she cried. ‘I shouldn’t have . . .’
‘No, and now you’ll get what you deserve. Nothing,’ he slurred, staggered and tripped on the way back to his ute.
Thank God, it was over. He’d warned her. Now he would go home, lock himself away in the little chapel he’d built, and ask his warped idea of God for forgiveness. But before Nancy could blink away the tears and dust from her eyes he was running towards them again. Teresa was screaming, the words drowned out by a revving engine, tyres spinning wildly, but the ditch was deep.
‘Get in the car. Hurry, Nancy, hurry.’
‘Go, go right ahead, bitch. Leave before I kill you for real,’ Tim shouted, arms swinging high over his head.
‘What are you doing? No! No, Tim, please . . .’
‘You can go, but you’re not taking my kids. I might hate you but I love my children. And because I love them I won’t have the town sneering and calling them sick scum. If you leave me tonight you can never come back. As far as the town knows, you’ll be dead. And Nancy, I wish you were.’
He swung.
Strike one: BANG—the sound of metal hitting metal created a chain reaction inside the Holden, starting with the shrill cry of confusion and escalating screams of two frightened little voices in a basket on the back seat.
‘Mum-maaaaa! Mum-maaaa!’ her babies cried.
‘For God’s sake!’ Teresa’s guttural call was so distressing Nancy wondered if she’d been hurt. ‘Get in the car, Nancy. Get in. Get in—now.’
Strike two: THWACK—the thud of shatterproof glass finally giving way.
Nancy grabbed Tim’s arm to no avail, powerless, despite his inebriated state.
Strikes three, four, five: SMASH. SMASH. SMASH.
The babies squealed louder, more heartbreaking, more tormenting, more terrifying for Nancy on the outside. Distraught, she clawed at her husband’s bar-wielding arm as he bashed the shattered back window to clear it of glass.
‘He’ll kill us,’ Teresa was yelling.
No, no, Nancy told herself. Her husband was not a killer. He wouldn’t hurt a neighbour. He wouldn’t hurt his wife. He wouldn’t hurt his own children.
A full moon low in the sky cast eerily long shadows, making the wielding of the metal fence post more monster-like, more chilling. Nancy tried wrestling the weapon from her husband’s fierce grip.
‘God, no!’
‘Now you want to pray?’ he sneered, pushing her so she fell, small stones gouging the skin from her knees. ‘Go ahead, sick bitch, but you are beyond redemption.’
‘I’m begging.’ She scrambled back to her feet, dragging on the tails of Tim’s shirt, desperate to hold him back, to keep him away from the babies.
‘Beg all you like. You have nothing. The twins are mine. To them you won’t even exist.’
He shoved her and with a final swing at the remaining glass, like a baseball player strikes a ball, chunks of skin-piercing shrapnel peeled away and flew into the flesh on Nancy’s exposed arms.
‘Calm down, please. We can talk? Let’s talk, Tim. I’ll come back to the house. Let’s work things out—the two of us.’ Nancy tried Teresa’s driver’s door, but it was locked, the car wheels still spinning. She banged on the glass and when Teresa refused to look she raced to the passenger seat, clambered in and begged Teresa, ‘Stop, stop, we have to stop this. The babies—’
There was a loud thud as Tim launched himself onto the Holden’s boot to reach for the twins. When he did, the added weight gave the rear wheels the traction Teresa needed to propel them forward and out of the ditch. By now Nancy was on her knees on the bench seat, desperate to clamber into the back, but unable to stop her husband from reaching through the rear window and ripping one terrified child from the other’s hold.
‘Nooo!’ Nancy cried out. ‘Stop. Please, stop. Not my babies. Don’t take my babies.’
‘Hang on.’ Teresa floored the accelerator so hard that the passenger door slammed shut, the sudden forward motion catapulting Nancy over the bench seat and into the rear foot well. Within seconds she was up and crawling over glass and out the back window on her knees, one hand holding on, the other outstretched. ‘Please, don’t take my baby. Stop, Teresa. Turn around. I have to go back. Let me go back.’ But like a woman possessed, Teresa didn’t stop, she didn’t slow, driving full-pelt into the darkness.
In the backseat of the smashed-up Holden, the whoosh of night air bitterly cold, a distraught mother and her precious baby girl clung as tight as they knew how, holding each other all the way to Sydney.
Mother and daughter were still clinging to each other the day Alice met Nancy.
When finally hearing the full story for the first time, and how Nancy feared Tim might come looking for his daughter, Alice the protector had no choice but to take over. She moved the three of them from Sydney’s western suburbs to Manly and suggested a change of name before registering for the new school term, something as simple as a switch to using the child’s middle name. Nancy had already altered Brown to Browne, adding an ‘e’ on documentation, but it was her eventual suggestion they take Alice’s surname that had thrilled Alice, even though their union would be unofficial, in name only.
While some parents wrapped their children in cotton wool, Nancy—and now Alice—had wrapped Paige in untruths all her life, including the contraception story to explain Nancy’s daughter to friends. Nancy had planned on explaining the turkey baster concept to Paige when her daughter was old enough to understand, hoping she’d see the funny side in the story’s telling. Nancy had such a way of telling the story that even Alice laughed.
They’d both stopped laughing after a letter from Paige’s real father found Nancy.
At first there was panic and tears—lots and lots of tears.
‘He’s going to find us,’ Nancy had cried. ‘He’ll take her away.’
Alice arrived home after work to find Nancy had consumed the remainder of the Lindeman’s wine cask they kept in the refrigerator in case friends dropped by for a drink. She’d soothed Nancy, held her, hoped she’d cry herself to sleep, all the time promising they’d make plans the following day to move—again.
The letter lay open on the bed, close enough for Alice to see the words: If you ever try to make contact I WILL make sure the authorities know you’re an unfit mother. I won’t have to take anything away from you. They will.
‘No one is taking Paige away. I won’t let that happen.’
‘I do trust you, Alice, I do. But, please, promise me. Look me in the eye and swear you’ll never say anything to anyone. You can’t lose me then Paige. She’ll need you, and you’ll need her more than ever once I’m gone. Only you can be her mother. We’ll make it legal. Why didn’t I think to do this before now? With you legal guardian in my will you can go somewhere and start over as mother and daughter; no one will ever have to know anything different. I’ll make sure Paige understands as long as you promise me.’
Alice refused to plant seeds of doubt in a dying woman’s mind. That meant not telling Nancy how Tim Brown could, in fact, contest the guardianship if he was to find out about his wife’s death. Alice knew a scrap of paper with a mother’s wish that her daughter adopt Alice’s name was not enough. That meant she’d have to swallow her pride to ask her parents for assistance. Although estranged for years, Alice knew Colin Foster could help, especially with his public service job and contacts in the Attorney General’s Department. But would her father help after everything? After all this time?
Alice had come a long way from the day her parents had all but disowned her at sixteen, insisting she would eventually ‘grow out of this phase’. Of course, Alice knew there was little chance of that when, a few years later, she met her first serious girlfriend. She’d fallen in with the student nurse crowd, most of them around the same age as Alice—bar one. Older by some eight years, her name was Trudi—with an i—and she’d quickly latched on to a still relatively naive Alice. There followed a carefree and experimental existence: nightclubbing, drinking until all hours, rolling into work hung over and popping No Doz to stay awake on midnight shifts and back-to-backs. The affair with Trudi was as short as it was intense, as were the several flings that followed. For a while, Alice’s behaviour had attested the claims of promiscuity that her mother had wailed over, lamenting her daughter’s decision and threatening to disown her, if only to save face with friends.
Faye had eventually initiated contact, the clandestine meetings meant to convince Alice to come home and patch things up with her father.
‘We don’t want this life for you,’ she would tell her daughter. ‘We want you to have what we have.’
Alice was tempted to respond with, ‘And what’s that? A busy social calendar?’ She didn’t, of course.
‘Those people you’re involved with . . . They’re promiscuous and they get diseases and . . . You could end up with that terrible chlamydia or something worse and not be able to have children.’
Hearing the name of a sexually transmitted disease spoken from the rose-pink lips of Faye Foster might have made Alice smile if the topic had not been so serious.
‘Mum, I am one of those people and promiscuity is only what you see; not how it really is and God knows, hardly different to—’
‘Language, please, Alice.’
Of all the things Faye could worry about right now, it was Alice’s blasphemy that rated a whispered warning and stern look across the café table.
‘You know what I mean, Mum. I’m in a very loving relationship and she and I are as committed as any other—’
‘Oh my goodness, no!’ Faye’s frantic hand movements looked like a traffic cop’s. ‘I don’t want to hear details.’ Those words formed her mother’s mantra. Avoiding details and confrontation was what Faye did best—waiting until whatever it was blew over. Until then, she’d go on being the hostess with the mostest, the life of the party, the good and obedient wife, the mender in the family. ‘We only want what’s best. You’re our only child.’
‘And because of that I’m expected to forgo what I want? And be what, Mum?’
‘A good wife and a mother.’
‘I can be gay and still be those things, Mum.’
‘Oh for goodness’ sake, you’re being ridiculous. Of course you can’t.’
Alice could only shake her head. ‘I guess that invitation to come back home is no longer valid.’
The wobble in her mother’s chin told Alice she was about to cry. ‘You’re father . . . He . . .’
‘I know. I know. It’s okay, Mum.’
‘Why did you have to tell us, Alice?’ Faye beseeched. ‘Why couldn’t you have kept your . . . lifestyle a secret? So many do. Why tell us when all you needed to do was . . . ? I mean, we could have avoided all this . . . this hurt and upset if only—’
‘If only I’d lied?’
‘Yes.’
That might have been the one time her mother was right. Maybe a lie would have been better than a confession, just as some secrets were better kept for the sake of others.
Nursing had taught Alice about the good lie, when deliberate omission and deceit morphed with a care-giver’s moral code to form something ‘more acceptable’ than the truth: How much to tell a patient? How much to keep from a traumatised husband, wife, mother, child about the person they loved? Duties and hospital policy had guided Alice’s moral code back then. The one time she’d let her heart take the lead she’d fallen hopelessly in love with a patient named Nancy, and her brave little girl.
Luckily for Alice, Faye’s efforts to mend her family were not in vain. After Nancy died, Colin Foster stepped up, assumed control and knocked Alice’s socks clear off. So totally smitten by the unexpected joy of an instant granddaughter, he had refused to let either of them out of his life. As a senior public servant—high enough that his manipulating the system wouldn’t, as he would say, ‘draw the crabs’—Colin Foster did the last thing Alice could have reasonably expected. He gave her what she needed most. Finally Alice had paperwork to support the lies for Paige’s licenses and passport, showing Paige as officially hers, just as Nancy had wanted. She never knew how he managed it; she didn’t ask about the lies he’d had to tell and the matter was never mentioned again.
Forever cautious, there would be no shouting from the rooftops for Alice, but their lives would require fewer secrets and lies. Thanks to her father, Alice could do what she’d promised; protect Paige from the truth so Nancy’s secret stayed locked away until the day Alice took it to her own grave.
16
Paige
Like most everything else in this unremarkable little town, Paige saw nothing special about the weathered sandstone building adjacent to the yellow weatherboard church with the maroon trim around arched doors and windows. In fact, the stone structure mimicked every other community hall in every other small town they’d driven through. Above the front door, carved out of reddish stonework, were the words Art School, this one included the year 1932; such unimposing structures and yet vital to their communities, their existence contributing to a town’s cultural, social, and political development over the decades.
Even though Sharni had said to expect eighty to a hundred attendees, with less than half an hour to go before the function’s official start time very few cars sat in the empty field on the other side of the hall. Paige parked a little away from the mob, which probably made her Audi appear even more precious in the paddock scattered with work vehicles, then followed a few paces behind a woman in a pink shirt and floral-print skirt.
The well-dressed woman waved and waited for Paige to catch up. ‘Hello there,’ she said, wiping her feet on the near threadbare coir doormat. ‘Thank goodness the rains holding off. We should see a good turn up tonight. I’m Brenda Graham. You’re the lass staying with young Sharni.’
Season of Shadow and Light Page 20