by Ros Baxter
And then there was another memory of Gage at this waterhole. And she definitely couldn’t think about that in polite company. She sighed. ‘I see the waterhole.’
‘Colour?’
Lou sighed again, resigned to having to do this right. She really focused this time. It was early morning, and after a better sleep than she’d had in about ten years – a better sleep than she deserved – she’d woken and crept out to find Sharni. She should have known where she would be, and what she would be doing. In the post-dawn light, the pool reflected grey and gold. It was cut low into the land, and its banks were bordered by silver gums. In some places, other trees trailed into the water, dipping their lacy fingers in to check the temperature. The grass grew close to the water’s edge, impossibly green in the early light, the only sign of lushness in the current drought. On one bank, the sides cut high into a rock escarpment, and the colours there were chalky pink and green. Against the horizon, the last lazy smudges of sunrise were vacating the sky, setting off the whole thing like some sweet frame.
‘Yeah,’ Lou agreed. ‘Lots of colour, but subtle. Silvery.’ The beauty of it grabbed at her, threatening to pull her under an ocean of memories. Sharni loved the colours of this place, but Lou had always loved it too. Lou had thought Stone Mountain was like some kind of undiscovered Eden, back before everything changed.
Sharni nodded. ‘Exactly. So where to start? Which piece, which slice?’ She freed her hair from the ponytail and shook it out. ‘Or the whole thing, somehow?’
Lou shrugged, watching her friend puzzling over the problem, her red hair spilling around her like a halo, reflecting the dying sunrise, looking like she was made for this place. ‘I keep telling you, a self-portrait,’ she said.
Sharni scoffed. ‘Even if that was a good idea,’ she said, sitting back down on the little stool as Lou sprawled out beside her on the grass, ‘I don’t even know how.’
‘If you could see yourself out here,’ Lou said, picking up one of Sharni’s brushes and pretending to paint in the air. ‘You’d understand why I think it’s a good idea. You were made for this place.’
It hurt to say it. It hurt so much, a low burn in her tummy, like anticipated loneliness. Maybe because Lou knew that it would be hard for Sharni to leave this time. Sharni had avoided coming home after the split with Matt, not just because she knew her parents would urge her to try again, but more because she understood the pull of this town on her soul. And she was afraid to be Sharni from Stone Mountain again. In the city she was anonymous. She could be vegetarian and eat sushi and do tai chi and get shiatsu and be a Buddhist. In Stone Mountain, she was plain old Sharni Likes Her Pie.
‘Mmm …’ Sharni seemed to be considering the idea.
‘I know,’ Lou said. ‘I’ll take a picture of you.’ She swept her arms around. ‘Out here where you belong. In your element. Then you can paint it.’
Sharni wrinkled her nose and Lou could tell by the look on her face that she was about to protest and that it was going to be a big one. ‘No, no, no,’ Lou said. ‘Don’t worry, you could still come back out here to do the actual painting. Get the colours right and all that.’
Lou flicked out her phone and started snapping Sharni. At first, she was shy, hiding and ducking behind trees. But Lou chased her and soon she warmed up to it, posing, her brushes in midair, sitting looking over the waterhole, throwing rocks at the far escarpment, swinging on the tyre. It felt so good, Lou almost forgot she was ticked with her friend. Almost.
‘Hey,’ Lou said, once they’d finished the impromptu photo shoot. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? About Piper?’
Sharni rolled over from where she’d been lolling on the grass and propped herself up on one elbow. ‘Because you made me promise.’
Lou snorted. ‘I also made you promise not to let me drink tequila and eat Stone Mountain beef at the reunion.’
Sharni giggled. ‘That was different,’ she insisted. ‘Anyway, we were in that together.’ Then her face clouded over and Lou just knew she was thinking about the dance with Matt.
Lou poked her in the ribs, not wanting her to dwell on him. ‘Doesn’t matter. You’re right, I did make you promise.’
Sharni nodded. ‘I did wonder, Lou. I really did. I thought maybe I should tell you when it happened, seventeen years ago. But you were still so raw right then. And I was still so far away from you. I was scared how you might take it.’ She rolled closer. ‘And when you made me promise, I knew you meant it. I knew how serious you were.’ She waved her arms around. ‘About never, ever coming back here. And I understood why.’
Lou lay very still on the grass. They never spoke about it. They had, in the past, but they never did, except on one day every year, when Lou got drunk and Sharni came along to clean up. And she wasn’t sure she could talk about it now. The two women lay in the grass, watching the last shards of pink flee the sky as it turned a deeper blue.
‘What was she like?’ The need to know burned in Lou like a red-hot ember.
‘Shirralee? I only met her coupla times. She was just some horsey girl, passing through, helping out on the property.’ Sharni lifted her hands, like she was trying to trace the exact shape made by a drooping gum tree against the canvas of the blue sky. ‘She was nice, pretty, maybe a bit mixed up.’ She paused. ‘He didn’t love her.’
Lou froze, her perspective narrowing in to Sharni’s voice.
‘Oh, he tried alright. Anyone could see that. And I hear he begged her to stay.’
Lou tried to imagine how Sharni would know that. Only in goddamn Stone Mountain would someone so removed know something so intimate, so devastating, about you.
‘But he didn’t love her.’
Lou blinked back tears. ‘Now how can you possibly know that?’ Did she know how badly Lou wanted to believe her?
‘Two reasons,’ Sharni said, her voice suddenly very serious. ‘One, because she left.’ She rolled herself up and sat, leaning against the tree she’d been tracing in the sky. ‘And I’m sorry, Lou, but I just can’t imagine any woman leaving Gage Westin if he loved her. Especially if she’d just had a baby with him.’
Lou nodded and swallowed hard.
‘And two.’ Sharni cleared her throat. ‘Because he loved you. And you broke his heart.’
It was Lou’s turn to sit up suddenly, her heart thundering, her breath whipping in her ears. ‘What are you saying?’
‘He loved you,’ Sharni said simply, her green eyes full of sadness.
‘We were seventeen,’ Lou said quietly, not trusting her voice.
‘Meh.’ Sharni shrugged. ‘Still.’
Lou’s insides were quivering with confusion. ‘Why didn’t you ever say that before?’
Sharni looked at her friend like she had two heads. ‘Would it have made any difference?’ She frowned. ‘Anyway, I didn’t know, not really, until graduation night,’ she said. ‘And after that, you weren’t in any shape to hear. And then …’ Sharni made a futile gesture with her right hand. ‘And then you made me promise. And I wasn’t sure. Until you came back here. Until I saw the two of you in the same room.’
‘I think …’ Lou said, standing up and dusting herself off. ‘I think you’re just remembering a teenage crush.’
Sharni stood up as well and raised an eyebrow at Lou. ‘Maybe,’ she said, holding out her hand to Lou, who took it automatically. ‘Helluva half-life for a teenage crush, huh? And they worry about that yellow cake out back of Bakerville.’
Lou smiled, trying to make light, wanting the conversation to be over now. ‘I hear they do, sometimes,’ she said, her face hurting with the effort of smiling. ‘Linger a bit I mean. Crushes.’
Then she bent down to help Sharni gather up her stool, easel and bag. As they stood to go, she stopped, looking back at the waterhole, hearing again the hooting and hollering of their childhood, seeing the spectre of Gage Westin, lean and wild and full of bad intent, hurling himself into the water. ‘You know, Sharni, it wasn’t just the …’ She flapped her hand in a
gesture she knew Sharni understood. ‘I mean it probably would have always made me run away, for a bit. But it was what that whole thing made me understand – that I couldn’t be like her. That I couldn’t settle for some hot boy who didn’t know about duty and responsibility and …’ She shook her head hard. ‘And protecting the people you love.’
Sharni nodded. ‘I know, honey,’ she said, reaching out to squeeze Lou’s shoulder. ‘I know what you thought.’ Sharni looked out at the waterhole too. ‘The thing is, sometimes people aren’t what we thought. And we don’t know what they are till they’re tested.’ She turned to face Sharni. ‘Poor Gage,’ she said, her face eloquent with compassion. ‘He was twenty, and he had a baby to look after.’ She shook her head. ‘And he did real well, didn’t he?’
Lou nodded dumbly, knowing what Sharni was going to say before she opened her mouth.
‘Maybe he wasn’t like one of Skye’s men after all.’
Lou swallowed. Sharni was right, but it didn’t matter. Whatever had almost happened twenty years ago hadn’t. And if Lou really had broken his heart back then, well, she’d had other things on her mind and her own heart was in no condition to argue.
Sharni wrapped an arm around Lou as they walked back up to the house. ‘Will you go see her?’
‘Mum?’ Lou knew who Sharni meant, but she was stalling.
‘No,’ Sharni said shortly. ‘I know we’ll be seeing lots of Skye, sorting this mess out. That’s not who I meant, and you know it.’
Lou shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, realising as she said it she had been wondering the same thing herself. ‘I don’t think so. No good can come of it.’
‘Mmm,’ Sharni said shortly, not sounding convinced. ‘Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me.’ They reached the fork in the path that led to the Pies’ place one way and the Westins’ the other. ‘Wanna come for brekky?’
Lou shook her head. ‘Nah, I’ve got a prior commitment.’
Sharni raised an eyebrow.
‘Piper,’ Lou explained, not looking back as she turned up the path.
When she arrived back at the house, the girl was waiting for her on the wide veranda, walking up and down. ‘You’re late,’ she said accusingly. ‘You almost missed my pancakes.’ She pouted the tiniest bit, before pulling her lips together quickly. ‘And they’re good.’
But Lou recognised the look on her face: the girl had thought she wouldn’t show. Lou knew the look well, or at least the feeling. She had felt it a thousand times in her own life, waiting at school plays, athletics carnivals and speech nights. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, vaulting up the five or six stairs quickly to stand in front of her. ‘I went to the waterhole.’ She shrugged. ‘Old habit. It’s beautiful there in the morning.’
Piper’s face softened. ‘You know it?’
Lou laughed. ‘Every kid in Stone Mountain knew it.’
Piper’s face screwed up disbelievingly. ‘Dad –’ She corrected herself. ‘Gage played there? When he was a kid?’
Lou smiled at the girl whose regal face suddenly looked very young and eager for information. Lou wanted to get this right, didn’t want to spin her some line. Piper watched her suspiciously, her head on the side, those dark eyes she now knew were as green as her father’s trained on her. She had a strong feeling the girl would detect a line of bullshit in an instant.
‘I don’t think your dad ever played,’ Lou finally said. ‘But he did like to swim there. After he’d finished his chores.’ She thought about that a little. How wild and irresponsible Gage had seemed. It seemed strange, now, to think that’s how they’d all seen it.
‘He had a lot of chores.’ She swept a hand around to indicate the property. She smiled again to soften her words, which somehow seemed to poorly convey how hard Gage had always worked on this place. ‘But he did love that waterhole. We all did.’
Piper nodded, then paused, as though digesting Lou’s words. This was a girl comfortable with silence. ‘Who’s “we”?’
Lou searched through old memories, almost able to hear the catcalls and whooping of kids diving into that hole. ‘Anyone who wanted to,’ she said softly. ‘Which, back then, was pretty much everyone. Kids just kind of came and went.’
‘So Dad had a lot of friends?’ Piper was twisting a piece of hair nonchalantly around one finger, like she didn’t really care about the answer. But she was watching Lou from under that long fringe.
‘Um …’ Again, Lou felt, without really understanding why, that this conversation mattered very much to Piper. She wasn’t the type to make small talk. ‘He knew a lot of people,’ Lou said. ‘And a lot of the guys wanted to be friends with him.’ She shrugged. ‘He played a lot of sport.’
Piper nodded quickly, then turned on her heel, throwing a comment over her shoulder. ‘He doesn’t let anyone swim there any more.’
Lou felt the words land hot and hard in her stomach, but Piper’s next words distracted her from thinking any further.
‘Come on, Lou, your dad’s waiting.’
In honour of it being a Sunday, Gary had eschewed his usual uniform of grey pants and navy blue shirt in favour of black jeans and navy blue shirt. The effort at casual sat uncomfortably on him, making him look like a stranger to Stone Mountain, affecting the garb of its true sons. Which he was.
Both Lou and her father were so full of Piper’s pancakes the only option had been to migrate to the veranda and flop into two of the squatter’s chairs dotted around its perimeter.
‘My God, that girl of Gage’s can cook,’ her father marvelled, rubbing his skinny belly contentedly. ‘And she seems clever too,’ he added quickly, and Lou just knew he would be worried about looking like he was stereotyping. ‘Such a shame she left school after Year Ten.’
Lou was surprised, and filed the information away for future reference. Even Gage, who hadn’t had much truck with school, had gone through to senior. She had seen the way Gage looked at Piper, like the sun rose and set with her, and like she was the cleverest thing he’d ever seen. Lou was surprised he’d allowed her to pull out early.
Gary belched and covered his mouth apologetically. ‘Beg my pardon, honey.’ He grinned at her. ‘Not often an old bachelor gets a brekky like that one.’
Lou smiled wryly at him. Yeah, right. She knew for a fact that her bumbling, gangly father was the darling of the CWA here in Stone Mountain. And while he was blissfully unaware of the machinations to get him married, he couldn’t fail to notice the number of meals and cakes that were baked for him on a regular basis. He was, after all, far from stupid.
‘Okay, Dad,’ she said, getting to her feet to get the blood moving. Her father wanted something, and she needed to be on top of her game to deal with it. ‘What is it?’
But the mayor would wait until he was good and ready. ‘How’s your ma?’
Lou shrugged. ‘I rang the hospital earlier,’ she said, knowing full well her father would have as well, and wondering why they were engaging in this preliminary dance. Gary was direct; he only prevaricated when he was nervous. ‘She’s doing okay. They’ll keep her a coupla days.’
Gary nodded, then he too got up from his chair. He moved over to where Lou was standing at the timber railing, looking out over the front paddocks towards the mountain. ‘Y’know, Gage’s ancestors were among the first to settle this town. That’s why Stone Mountain is on their land. They did a deal with the local Indigenous people; a fair one too. And the Kooris never forgot that the Westins were the only ones who treated them decently. When relations soured with everyone else, the Westins stayed tight with them.’
Lou groaned. She didn’t need a lesson from the chair of the local historical society. Gary was normally pretty straight up, but he seemed nervous, and that in turn made Lou nervous. As odd as he was, as apparently flighty and awkward and socially off-kilter, he was a rock. She knew it, and the town knew it, and they both loved him for it. All through Lou’s childhood, there had never been any question that she would live anywhere but
with her mother, but nevertheless, he had always been there – keeping an eye on things, making sure she was okay. And then, later, when things got so much worse, he was very clear that he was an escape route if she decided she needed it. She should have taken him up on it.
Goddamn, she should have.
Her patience started to wear a little thin and her irritation at bad teenage decisions welled up in her. She turned to face her father. ‘Dad,’ she snapped. ‘What is it? What do you want? I can tell something’s up.’
Gary shrugged in that way that made all the women in town want to mother or marry him. ‘I’ve got some trouble.’
‘Okay,’ Lou said slowly, in an effort to elicit more detail. ‘What manner of trouble?’ She tried to catalogue all the kinds there could be as she waited for him to answer. Money? That she could handle. Woman? She frowned over at him. Unlikely. Only one woman had ever troubled Gary, and that was long done now.
Gary ran a hand through his floppy grey hair. ‘The council’s damn near broke. The previous administration racked up all kinds of crazy debts, and the drought has just about finished it off.’ He looked hard at her, as if he was trying to clock whether she understood. ‘Do you know what that means for towns like ours?’
Lou considered his question. Amalgamation? Bankruptcy?
But her father didn’t wait for her answer. ‘The drought hasn’t just touched the farmers, it strangles the town. No-one can pay for anything. Times are tough.’ He ran his hand along the solid timber of the veranda railing, as though he was searching for an answer there. ‘Very, very tough. No money means no services. It means infrastructure deteriorates, libraries close. Services just stop. Then the town dies.’
A piece of Lou – a tiny, traitorous piece – wanted to say: So what, who cares?
But then an image flashed through her mind: Sharni at the waterhole. Then another: Piper making her pancakes, telling Lou snippets about life on the property; the way her face lit up as she talked about Sunset Downs. And Gage – Gage’s hard, beautiful face. Gage who had fought since the time he was ten to keep this piece of land alive.