by Ros Baxter
As she lay there, she was sure there had been at least one other judgement error she should be recalling in a well-deserved bout of post party paranoia, but it was so hard to unravel through the discomfort, the noise and the pain. Nevertheless, in the mean-spirited way of bad memories, they started peeking through. The booze. The beef – oh God, she could still taste it. Shazza Maclean. The fight. And –
Holy fuck.
Lou sat up bolt upright, eyes opening with a wretched blast of white hot pain, her stomach freefalling under a combined assault of shame, self-disgust and nausea, and her hands flying to the traitorous mouth that had opened so shamelessly for Gage Westin the night before.
‘Sharni!’ Lou shook her best friend brutally.
A tangled red head lifted from the sheets, moved slightly in a way that suggested she was assaying her whereabouts in much the same way Lou had for the last five minutes, and flopped to the pillow again. ‘Water,’ the hair croaked piteously.
‘But Sharni –’
‘Water,’ the hair repeated. ‘For the love of God, Louise, water. And a bucket.’
Lou sighed. The call for a bucket trumped Lou’s own catalogue of misery, so she gingerly swung her legs over the side of the bed, placed her feet on the floor very gently to check if they might break under the strain of the hangover they were supporting, then padded to the bar fridge to retrieve two bottles of water. She emptied the contents of the small waste bin onto the carpet, and dashed as gently as possible back to the hard bed. From there, she managed to pass one bottle of water to Sharni under the ramshackle tent of her hair, remove the lid from the other and pour a good two-thirds of it into her parched mouth. She stretched out for her handbag to locate four migraine-busting pills, passed two to Sharni and prepared to swallow the other two even though she was sure doing so would feel like swallowing a microwave oven. She achieved all this while staying completely horizontal and employing an economy of movement that would have impressed her tai chi instructor no end.
‘What are they?’ Sharni’s voice was pure pain.
‘They’ll knock you out.’ Lou was damn sure that’s all she wanted right now. The bedside clock blinked accusingly at her that it was seven in the morning, and most of Stone Mountain had been up for two hours by now.
Sharni was quiet for a moment, holding the two pills in her hand. ‘What about our flight?’
‘What about it?’ Lou’s brain was having trouble making connections.
‘It’s at ten. We might miss it.’ Sharni’s tone suggested she couldn’t care less if she didn’t fly for a week, but that she felt obliged to remind Lou of the timing issue. Because of their deal. And because of how Lou felt about this town.
Lou groaned internally. ‘What time is the next one?’
Sharni swore. ‘Jeez, Lou, there are only two. Morning and afternoon. Ten and five.’
Lou thought quickly, or at least as quickly as was possible with pain and shame screaming at her to take the damn pills. ‘We’ll get the five o’clock.’ As she said it, she realised she must be dying, because surely nothing else could keep her in this town a moment longer, let alone seven hours.
Sharni pulled herself up just enough to shove the pills into her mouth, revealing the angry bruise on her face from the night before, and the two women bumped bottles.
‘Bottoms up,’ Lou said, sinking back into the pillows with relief, knowing that in fifteen minutes it would all go away.
The tombstone was the new kid on the block, its edges shiny and sharp, its plaque glassy fresh. Lou stood reading the words, over and over, but they made no sense. They were hieroglyphs, dancing mysteriously in front of her eyes, refusing to form meaning.
Baby pink roses decorated the small patch of ground in front of the stone, and their petals shook as a slight breeze ruffled the thick edge of heat.
She wanted to be in it. She wanted to tear the stone out, uproot it from the ground, scratch in the dirt with her bare hands until they were cracked and bloody, and crawl in there too. She imagined how cool and peaceful it would be to finally lay her head somewhere where it didn’t ache and spin with all the things that had happened.
If only she could do a trade.
She kneeled on the grassy patch and laid her face down near the roses. The ground was harder and scratchier than it looked, and her cheek stung as a stray thorn assaulted it. The pain felt good. She closed her eyes and imagined lying in the grave, everything at an end, dirt being shovelled on top of her. She pictured her eyes being covered over, then her mouth and finally her nose.
And then she found she couldn’t breathe.
She was there; she was really in there. She told her body not to fight it, that this was what she wanted, but her body had its own agenda. It scraped and clawed against the earth and tried to drag in breath, finding only dirt and stones.
Panic ate into her and a scream hammered on her throat for release, only to be blocked by the suffocating dirt.
And then a croaky, insistent voice started pecking at her ear. It was Sharni, and she was yelling, ‘Lou, Lou!’ Her voice was raspy and crackly.
And, just like that, the spell was broken and Lou was sliding into consciousness in the little room at the Welcome Inn, with Sharni yelling her name in her ear and thrusting Lou’s mobile phone at her. Lou shook her head and tried to reach for the phone but her hand wouldn’t work properly. She glanced at the clock and saw that it was nine thirty, only a couple of hours after they’d taken the pills. No wonder she was nailed. She usually slept those suckers off for at least five hours. She concentrated hard on taking the phone from Sharni, whose face was pale green, apart from the red and purple bruise, and criss-crossed with pillow creases.
‘Say nothing,’ Sharni mumbled as she slumped back to the pillows. ‘However I look, you look worse.’
‘Why’d you pick up?’ Lou hissed at Sharni. Why would her friend, her dearest friend, do this to her? For a phone call?
Sharni shook her head sadly against the pillow. ‘Because it’s been ringing for half an hour,’ she said. ‘And it’s Skye.’
A hot jolt of nausea flooded Lou. She looked at the phone like it was alive; a creature of pure malevolence. Then she stabbed at the green talk icon, missing twice before her index finger connected.
‘Mum,’ she growled into the phone.
‘No.’
As she registered the deep voice she wasn’t completely sure she’d woken up. She stopped and looked down at the phone again. Yep, that was definitely her mum’s name and number, there on the screen. She glanced over at Sharni, who was still looking worse than even Lou’s dream-brain could have conjured, as well as looking at Lou with the kind of empathy only your very oldest friends could summon for the most tragic bits of your life. Just to be sure, Lou took the phone and smacked herself on the forehead with it.
Ow. Yep, this was no dream, not even a nightmare.
She brought the phone back to her ear.
‘Lou?’ His voice bit deep into her belly, curling into the empty space he’d carved his initials on and reserved for himself twenty years before. ‘You okay?’
She grunted something non-committal into the phone. What was happening? And how was it happening? Why was Gage calling her? And why the hell was he doing it so persistently, so early and from her mum’s phone?
‘Lou,’ he continued, ‘did you just smack yourself with your phone?’
‘Yes,’ she said, impressed that she had finally managed to form a coherent word.
‘How come?’ She swore she could hear amusement in his voice, and the urge to give him a Chinese burn rose full and powerful in her soul.
How come? Did he have any idea what had happened to her in the last twenty-four hours? For the love of God, she’d come home – to Stone Bloody Mountain – for a reunion she didn’t want to go to; watched her best friend slow dance and get all gropey with the boy they had come to dish out some revenge to; been part of a pub brawl (well, kind of) and then pashed the baddest boy in town.
>
Again.
Like some Groundhog Day of bad ideas.
Now she had the hangover from hell, she’d missed her plane, and the drugs she had taken to make everything better had been cut short in their glorious healing work by a phone call from her mum, who sounded suspiciously like Gage Westin.
‘Don’t answer that,’ he said, suddenly sounding very serious. ‘Lou, I need to come get you. It’s your mum.’
‘My?’ The edges of Lou’s vision started to blur, as they usually did when the subject of Skye came up, except this time it was laced with a fat dose of surreal.
Gage’s voice sounded the way cops sound on TV when they knock on someone’s door at the beginning of Law & Order to tell the family that the daughter they thought had run away had actually been hideously murdered by some perp.
‘What’s happened? Is she –’ Lou’s breath was sharp in her throat, catching on the way up like it was full of splinters. She closed her eyes and pictured her mum, so different from her: tall and blonde and laughing; bright blue eyes winking and smiling, full of the carelessness of a fifteen-year-old.
‘She’s alive,’ Gage confirmed shortly, and only someone who knew her mum would take that as reassurance. ‘I’ll be there in five.’ She told him the room number and he hung up.
And that was Gage. No sense of the social niceties. No ‘You okay?’ No ‘Don’t worry, pet.’ No ‘It’ll all be alright.’ Gage Westin operated on a whole other set of rules from normal people. He always had. He’d somehow been born without that invisible barometer by which other people measure and evaluate their actions, usually against the tide of public or family opinion. He just truly didn’t give a damn. By the time he was ten, he only went to school when it pleased him, usually for football carnivals and trophy days. He didn’t wear his uniform, unless it was required for sport. He didn’t abide curfews, traffic laws, or rules about the age at which children were allowed to drive cars. He got into fights when the issue struck him as important enough, and dated only the prettiest, easiest girls. Rumour had it he lost his virginity before he was even out of primary school, but Lou had never been game enough to ask. She couldn’t bear to know.
She turned to Sharni.
‘What is it?’ Sharni asked. Her face had gone from green to very pale grey, and her eyes were dark with worry.
‘Dunno,’ Lou mumbled, dragging her suffering body from the bed. ‘But get dressed, we’ll know soon enough.’
‘Was that Gage Westin?’
Lou’s mouth dropped open. ‘How do you know?’
‘I know everything,’ Sharni whispered, exiting the other side of the bed. ‘I’ve known you since forever.’ She turned from where she was wriggling into last night’s jeans and shot Lou a look. ‘And I know there’s only ever been one boy who could put that stunned-mullet expression on your face.’
Lou dragged on a flowery dress that never scrunched, one she’d thrown into her bag at the eleventh hour, thinking it might be good for the plane trip home, and made for the bathroom to wash her face. She examined the ruins of the night before, and tried to work out where she might start. Foundation. If in doubt, always start with foundation. She sighed and rubbed a finger across her bottom lip, trying to remember who had ended that kiss last night and how.
‘Hey.’ He was leaning in the doorway in what looked suspiciously like the same jeans as the night before, and a touchably soft-looking, open-necked white shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, and dark glasses.
‘Big night?’ She took in the dark glasses, the hard lines around his mouth that she hadn’t noticed the night before, and the faint smell of whiskey.
‘Less interesting after you left,’ he said, grabbing her suitcase and standing aside to let the two women through.
Lou tried to walk steadily past him, resisting the wicked pull of his pheromones that whispered wickedly at her as she passed him. ‘Where is she?’ She glanced up at him. Mistake. Big mistake. He took off his sunglasses and ran his hand over his eyes. Then he met hers, and the full, smoky-green blast of them was like being walloped with a sledgehammer.
‘The Masons’,’ he said blandly, holding out his hand for Sharni’s case and referring to the Freemason hospital, the town’s only one.
‘Dear God.’ Lou had been there once, with her mother, when she’d been small, to visit a family friend who’d had a baby. She could still remember the unforgiving smell that had seemed to seep from the very walls: disinfectant, Betadine and stone-cold judgement. She stopped, her feet seeming to give up in protest at the pain, shame and exhaustion now laced with a hot shot of guilt. Skye would hate it there. And Lou didn’t blame her.
Gage lifted the two suitcases like they weighed no more than a loaf of bread instead of being loaded down by approximately twenty outfits and fifty kilos of cosmetics Lou and Sharni had each brought in an attempt to get things just right for the reunion. ‘After you.’
He motioned them to go ahead of him and Lou was irritated to see Sharni give Gage a thousand-watt smile that belied the fact that two hours previously she had looked as though she had narrowly cheated death.
‘You look like shit, Gage,’ Sharni clucked as she strode past him in her cowgirl boots.
It was a lie, of course. Even looking as though he too had given the whiskey a fair nudge the night before, even looking like he’d slept little and possibly been up early working on the property, he was still the poster boy for The Farmer Wants a Wife.
‘Why thank you, sweetie pie,’ he purred as he followed them to the lift. ‘You look mighty fine yourself.’
Sharni giggled as they all crowded into the tiny lift. Gage was enormous in the small space, his head barely clearing the roof, his body taking up a good third of the room.
‘Shoulda taken the stairs,’ he growled, fidgeting on the spot and accidentally brushing against Lou’s shoulder as he did. A whizz of electricity snarkier than their Year Twelve English teacher zapped Lou and she wanted to scream. She forced herself to lean away from him as the lift continued its tortured journey.
‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘How come it was you?’
Gage raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Me who called you?’
Lou nodded.
‘Dad found her.’ Gage said the words like he might say, ‘Dad murdered her’: without meeting Lou’s eyes and with a tone of deep regret.
Goosebumps broke out on Lou’s arms. ‘He …?’ She searched for the right words. ‘They …?’
He spared her the misery. ‘Yup,’ he agreed, as the lift doors creaked open and he sprang from its confines. ‘They are.’
Lou watched him as he stalked down the corridor.
Bo Westin. In a long succession of ne’er-do-wells, Lou’s mother had to have reached her peak with Bo. Ever since Gage’s mother had died when he had been four or five, Bo had been a sad, steaming wreck. He’d started useless and miserable, graduated to seedy and careless, and slowly but determinedly descended the social ladder to loose, bad and criminal. Bel Westin would have rolled in her grave.
Despite the early efforts of some of the better-meaning townsfolk, Gage’s father would have lost the farm but for Gage deciding, around the age of ten, that keeping Sunset Downs going was far more important than anything else – school, friends, even football. After his mother died, Gage had never done what anyone told him, but he obeyed the commands of that fickle, bitchy piece of dirt like it was God himself speaking to him. And he loved it like most people loved their children.
Bo Westin was one lucky man. He sure as hell wouldn’t have a property left if it hadn’t been for his son.
Lou stood at the hotel reception counter as Mary Moriarty fiddled with their account, feeling like the whole town must know about her mother’s most recent incident.
Mary sidled back to Lou and Sharni in her short denim skirt and off-the-shoulder top, her narrow eyes twinkling. ‘I hear you kids really tied one on last night over at the Queen’s Arms,’ she said in a voice creaky with the effects of a pack of smo
kes and a hip flask a day.
Lou ignored her, searching for her credit card.
‘You stay over too, Gage?’ She looked Lou and Sharni up and down. ‘It’s extra for unregistered guests.’ Mary smirked at Gage, who was standing back, his hands behind his back like he didn’t want to be accused of stealing anything.
Lou started to visualise her hands reaching up to choke the lecherous smile off Mary’s face, but Sharni stepped in, doing that thing she did so well.
‘Come on now, Mrs Moriarty,’ she said sweetly, working hard not to look as hungover as Lou was sure she had to feel. ‘What do you think Dad would make of that?’
Mary’s eyes narrowed even further as she considered Sharni. ‘Good question,’ she said, smiling like a hungry shark as she showed a mouth full of silver-filled teeth. ‘Why didn’t you stay with your folks last night?’
Sharni just beamed like Mary had asked for a weather report. ‘Oh,’ she said, smiling conspiratorially, ‘I knew for sure it’d be late and might get kinda messy. And you know how my folks are.’ She winked. ‘In bed by nine and up at five.’ And because I didn’t need yet another lecture about why I should give Matt Finlay another chance. But Lou knew Sharni wouldn’t add that.
Mary nodded like she too was the last bastion of clean living in Stone Mountain rather than a nasty old soak who loved nothing better than to spy on the goings-on at her motel and ask her guests rude questions about who’d stayed where. She turned to Gage. ‘How’s your dad?’ And, without looking at Lou, ‘And Skye?’