She’d never forgotten the look on his face. Like one mask falling away and another being revealed behind it. He knew exactly what she was talking about. Any hope she might have had of Leo saying, ‘No, you have it wrong,’ died in that moment. She’d turned away, unable to bear listening to him any more.
She ran. She left the caravan park before seven a.m., startling the owner who was barely awake, settling her bill, handing over Maggie’s belongings in a plastic bag. She waited at a bus stop outside the town for half an hour, stepping in and out of the shadow of the trees, terrified Leo and Clementine would drive past. Leo had said he would come back that morning. She wanted to be miles away before he appeared.
She hitchhiked in the end. An elderly woman on her way to visit her sister up the coast stopped for her. She disapproved of anyone hitching, she told Sadie, and proceeded to lecture her for the duration of the journey. Sadie was happy to listen, hanging her head, looking chastened, inwardly urging the woman to drive faster, to get her as far away as she could.
Two hours later she was in Brisbane. It was her first time there. She was terrified, short of money and alone. She wouldn’t let herself think about anything that had happened or what might happen next. She told herself this was a holiday, an adventure. She talked to herself as she had talked to Maggie over the past two weeks. Tried to make it exciting and fun. She had to fight to keep thoughts of her family out of her mind. They kept breaking through. Miranda, sneering at her: ‘What the hell did you think you were doing? Have you gone even madder than usual?’ Juliet, motherly, concerned and lecturing: ‘Have you any idea how worried everyone’s been? How could you be so thoughtless?’ Eliza, as judgemental as ever. She didn’t have to imagine what Clementine and Leo would have said. They had made it clear. Leo veering from anger to shock when he realised that she had read the diaries, that she knew his charade of the perfect marriage, the perfect mother, had been just that.
She spent her first night in a hostel, the cheapest she could find, surrounded by cheerful, loud girls from Germany, Ireland, Switzerland and the US on the latest stop of their year-long adventures. She lay in bed listening to them exchange travelling tips, funny stories from the road and checklists of the must-sees of Australia. At breakfast the next day she joined two of them in the communal kitchen. She had some fruit leftover in her bag. She offered it around and received some cheese and crackers in return.
They’d fired questions at her: ‘You’re Australian, aren’t you?’ ‘What’s your name?’
‘Sally,’ she said, without even a second’s hesitation. ‘Sally Donovan,’ she added, even more firmly.
It was so easy to make up a story. She told the two girls that she’d just finished her university degree and was taking a year out.
They told her about towns they’d stayed in in far north Queensland, where they received food and board in exchange for fruit picking, cleaning and packing jobs. They told her which hostel in Darwin to avoid because of its sleazy owner. They told her about a café in Cairns that acted as an informal employment exchange for backpackers. If you’re not fussy, there’s work everywhere, they said. Especially in Brisbane.
Sadie wasn’t fussy. She didn’t care what she did. All she knew for sure was she didn’t want to go back to Hobart. Ever.
Over the next few weeks she washed dishes and cleaned bathrooms and kitchens in pubs and restaurants in the city centre. She worked hard during the day so she would be exhausted at bedtime. She shared a dormitory with a changing cast of backpackers. She added more details to her own story. It was so easy, when there wasn’t someone like Miranda waiting with a smart put-down to contradict her.
She dyed her hair black, using a cheap mix from the chemist and getting the hostel bathroom into such a mess it took her two hours and a whole bottle of bleach to clean. She waited for the other girls to tell her off, the way Juliet or Eliza would have done. An Italian girl called Maria just laughed. Another girl offered to give her a hand when she found Sadie on her hands and knees scrubbing at the black splatters of dye.
In the daytime she managed to keep thoughts of her family at bay. All of them except for Maggie. It shocked her how much she was missing her niece. She hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye to her. What if Maggie thought Sadie had forgotten all about her? What had they all told Maggie? The thought gnawed at her. What could she do about it? She couldn’t ring home and ask to speak to her; try to explain to a five-year-old what the situation was. She was also unsure what Clementine might have decided to do. Press charges against her?
It was when she was walking back to the hostel from one of her casual jobs that she had the idea about contacting Maggie via Father Cavalli in Hobart. She’d passed a priest in the street, chatting to a young woman. The image stayed in her mind. Three days later she went to a phone box and made the call. Father Cavalli himself answered. If he hadn’t, Sadie knew she would have hung up. She didn’t say much. She wondered if he knew anything about the whole business yet. She suspected not. The Faradays had stopped going to mass in recent years. She told him that there had been a fight, without going into details. She wanted to be on her own for a while, but she didn’t want Maggie to think it was her fault. If she was to send a card to Maggie care of the priest’s house, would he pass it on to her?
He mouthed some platitudes to her, which she did her best to block out. It was his job, she supposed, so she made some pretence at listening. He urged her to find forgiveness in her heart, to understand that all families went through rocky periods, but stressed how important it was to let love cancel out conflict.
‘And what if there is no love there, Father?’
He went quiet.
‘Family love is the strongest of all, Sadie.’
She said goodbye soon after that. But she was grateful to him. He’d said he would act as a go-between. She gave him a poste restante address at the Brisbane GPO. If it changed, she would let him know.
‘Keep praying, Sadie,’ he urged her.
She hadn’t prayed for years and wasn’t about to start. She didn’t tell him that.
She sent a birthday card to Maggie the next day, a cheerful one with dancing mice on the front that she knew Maggie would love. Two weeks later her daily visit to the GPO was rewarded. There was a card waiting for her, in an envelope with unfamiliar writing. Father Cavalli’s, she presumed. Inside, a card from Maggie, thanking her and telling her that she had got two gold stars at school that week. I miss you and I love you, Maggie xxxxxx. There was a note tucked inside it from Leo. Sadie didn’t read it.
Over the next few months she lived the life of any happy-go-lucky backpacker. She went north for the mango picking, sleeping in hostels open to the weather and unfortunately also open to large spiders, snakes and flying fruit-bats. She woke up one day with a spider crawling across her pillow. She was back in Brisbane and her old hostel by nightfall. The next day she found work behind the bar of a city centre pub. It was that easy.
Why hadn’t she ever done this before? She’d never known there was this way to live, the sheer freedom of it. The incredible pleasure of being taken for herself, not as one of those Faraday girls, not as Miranda’s less glamorous sister, Clementine’s less clever sister, Juliet’s less hardworking sister or Eliza’s less athletic sister. She was just herself.
She added more layers to her story as necessary, depending on the questions she was asked. She told people she came from Adelaide. That both her parents were teachers. That they were putting on pressure for her to go into teaching too but she wanted to explore the world a bit first. She got sympathy and understanding from her fellow hostellers. Everyone took her as she was.
It surprised her to discover that the hostel held its own July Christmas celebration. She’d thought that was only a Faraday family tradition. All of the backpackers from the UK, Ireland and other parts of Europe threw themselves into the celebrations. Sadie chose not to get involved, spending the day at the cinema instead, seeing three films in a row and coming b
ack late after it was all over.
There was equal enthusiasm when the first December came around – lots of talk about how funny it was to have a hot Christmas, phone calls back to families on the other side of the world, all of them lining up to use the phone. One of the girls, a soft-hearted Scottish girl called Ruth, noticed that Sadie didn’t make any calls.
‘Can’t you afford it?’ she whispered. ‘I’m happy to give you the money if you want.’
‘No, but thanks.’
‘Is everything all right?’
‘We had a big fight,’ she said. It was the closest she’d ever come to telling the truth.
‘That’s what families are for, aren’t they? You’ll make it up, won’t you?’ Ruth had been so eager and optimistic.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘Don’t you want to? Don’t you miss them?’
Sadie didn’t miss them. Not yet. Every day she felt better than she had ever felt when she was with them. The only person she missed was Maggie.
Sadie went out for a walk. By the time she came back Ruth had told the others that Sadie was feeling sad because she’d had a fight with her family. A group of the other girls came over to her, all sympathy and hugs. ‘We’re here if you want to talk about it,’ a young Canadian woman said.
So Sadie talked. She told them the whole story. Not the real one. Another story just came tumbling out of her. That her father was violent. That he had beaten up her mother for years and that Sadie had come in one day and tried to stop it, and he had thrown a chair at her. She showed them the scar on her forehead. She’d got it falling off a swing at primary school when she was six.
The other girls sat around the table, staring at her, mouths open. She’d never received that kind of attention before. She had the faintest spike of guilt, thinking of Leo who had never raised a hand to any of them. Then she looked back at her audience and noticed how they were hanging on her every word.
Overnight in the hostel, she became the poster girl for survival. She felt guilty about it. There were people who had truly gone through what she was pretending to have experienced. But it was too late by then to take back her story.
She moved out of the hostel into a four-bedroom share-house a month later. One of the other girls from the hostel moved in too. The house was a timber Queenslander, up on stilts to let the cool air circulate, and with as much furniture out on the verandah as inside. Sadie didn’t have much furniture but she had her own room, a foam mattress on the floor, a clothes rack and a mirror. All she needed.
One of her new flatmates told her about a job going at a big hotel in the city. A cleaning job. Terrible hours, he said. She’d have to be there by six a.m., but she’d be finished by eleven and have the rest of the day to herself.
She liked the idea of it. She’d started doing a lot of swimming, enjoying the feel of her body in the water, getting stronger and fitter. If she got her work over in the morning, she could head to one of the beaches and spend all day swimming and reading.
She went for the interview, told the truth about all the cleaning jobs she’d had, told the usual lies about her name and background, so good at it now there was no way the interviewer would have picked it up. She got the call the next day. They wanted her to start on Monday. She’d be working in a pair, with an Irish guy called Peter O’Toole.
‘Call me Larry,’ he said when they met.
She liked him straightaway. He had such a happy smile. Happy as Larry, she thought. When they told the story to friends in later years she couldn’t ever say it was love at first sight. ‘It was like at first sight,’ she’d explain.
‘It was love at first sight for me,’ Larry always said.
Her first impression was good and, as she soon learned, accurate. He looked happy because he was happy. He’d been nicknamed Larry after Laurence of Arabia, the Irish actor Peter O’Toole’s most famous role. He was short for a man, only five foot seven. He had a round face, freckled skin, a stocky body, blue eyes and the widest, cheeriest smile Sadie had ever seen.
He was also the most enthusiastic person she had ever met. He thought Australia was amazing. He thought the cleaning job was ‘the biz’, as he put it. ‘Five hours work in the morning and that’s us free for the day. Call this work?’
They made a great team. They discovered that in the first week. They were assigned the nightclub areas of the hotel on the weekends, the conference rooms and lobby bar during the week. Larry did the heavy work: the furniture shifting, the industrial mopping, the lugging of trays of empty bottles out to the bottle bank. Sadie worked behind him, polishing, sweeping and restocking shelves. They took it in turns with the toilets, though if they were particularly bad, they did them together. They got such a routine going that one of the managers actually came down one morning to compliment them on the good job they were doing.
It was Larry’s idea to start even earlier than six, so they’d be finished and out even earlier too. ‘We could start at five and be free by ten. What do you think?’
‘What would we do then?’
‘Whatever we wanted. That extra hour would make all the difference. I want to learn how to surf, etcetera.’ He often said ‘etcetera’ instead of ‘for example’, in the wrong context. She found it very endearing. ‘Come and learn to surf with me, Sally.’
They learnt how to surf, then decided to also try windsurfing. Larry didn’t tease her when she turned out to be very bad at both activities. ‘Don’t worry about it. Get up and try again,’ he said each time. So she did.
They talked while they were working in the hotel together, talked while they were going to the beach, talked over cheap pizzas and games of pool. He called over to her share-house several nights a week. When a room became spare, he moved out of his hostel into her place. They talked even more. He told her about growing up in Dublin. She kept to her Adelaide story. She slowly learned that things hadn’t been easy for him as a child. His mother had left his father when he was only five. They’d moved around a bit. She worked in local hotels as a barmaid. It kept her too close to the drink, unfortunately.
‘That’s why you don’t drink?’ She only realised then that she’d never seen him have so much as a beer.
He wasn’t maudlin about it. ‘It never looked like much fun to me.’
So she didn’t drink when she was with him either. It didn’t make sense when they both had to be up at four a.m. anyway.
She heard bad stories about nights with his mother, having to help her upstairs to bed, finding her slumped outside the house, a series of men coming in and out of her bed and their life. He asked her about her family. She knew that he’d heard a hint of the story she’d first told in the hostel. She felt guilty and hedged around the subject. Hers was make-believe. His had been real. He was hurt when she closed up, hurt that she wouldn’t trust him enough to tell him, so she did. To compensate, she added more detail, describing a difficult childhood, a violent father and how scared she had been. She didn’t know where all the stories were coming from, but she couldn’t stop them, adding details of bullying at school and night after night of her parents fighting. The more she told, the more real it seemed to become.
One evening they were sitting out on the verandah together, enjoying the warm air and listening to the sound of cicadas. He had asked her a question about her school days. She had responded with a tragic tale about being in a school play and neither of her parents turning up, coming home to find her father beating her mother and then him turning on her. It had just come out of her mouth. He’d been silent for a while afterwards and she’d felt terrible. Guilt and shame. She’d gone too far this time.
Then Larry took her hand and held it against his heart as he spoke. ‘We’re peas in a pod, you and I.’ He told her how much he admired her. How amazing he thought she was to be so strong and cheerful and happy, with all that she had been through. And then he kissed her.
Sadie had never had a long-term boyfriend. She’d never really had any boyfri
end. She’d had kissing sessions as a teenager and lost her virginity as a nineteen-year-old at an awful party she and a friend had gatecrashed. She’d known the boy from university, had sex with him in one of the spare bedrooms, given him her number and never heard from him again.
She tentatively kissed Larry back. He stopped midway and pulled away from her.
‘I’m not very good at this,’ he said.
‘Me either.’
‘You? You must have had loads of fellas chasing you.’
Sadie told him the truth. He didn’t believe her. ‘You’ve never had a proper boyfriend? It’s true. Aussie men are thick as planks.’
They kissed again. When they drew away from each other the next time she noticed he was smiling. Beaming at her.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing’s funny,’ he said.
‘So why are you smiling?’
‘Because I’ve been waiting for this for weeks.’ He loved her, he said. It was as simple as that. He thought she was just great. He loved the way she looked, the things she said, the way she worked, the way she laughed.
She felt the same way about him, she replied, in a kind of wonder. She had never realised until that moment. All she’d known was she loved being with him. That working with Larry didn’t seem like work. That it didn’t matter if they were scraping muck off dance floors, washing hundreds of glasses or scrubbing filthy bathrooms; he somehow made it fun.
They kissed again, until one of their flatmates came out and applauded. ‘At bloody last.’
Larry moved into her room that night and they became lovers from then on. They worked together, played together and socialised together.
Sadie had never felt this way in her life. Not just loved, but protected. He was always on her side. He built her up in little ways, every day, with compliments and encouragement. It wasn’t all roses. They fought occasionally, but he was quick to apologise if it was his fault, and she sought his forgiveness if it was hers.
Those Faraday Girls Page 41