Hello from the Gillespies

by Monica McInerney

  ‘Lindy, come on!’ Victoria called, rubbing her hands together to keep warm. ‘We’re freezing out here.’

  Lindy poked her head out of the office window. ‘Hold on. Don’t start without me.’

  ‘What’s she doing in there?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Skyping Ireland, I guess,’ Victoria said. ‘Or emailing Ireland.’

  ‘She’s in love with Ireland,’ Ig said.

  It had been that way since Lindy had taken charge of organising the Gillespie reunion. After returning from Ireland, Nick had sent a group email to the international Gillespies. He’d chosen his words carefully, not mentioning Carol but explaining that there had been some discrepancies in the geneaology information he’d received from Ireland. That the information he’d sent them about the Gillespie homelands might not be accurate. No one cared. They all still wanted to go to Ireland. They liked the idea of staying in Cobh. Nick didn’t need to organise a whole week of touring Gillespie homelands, they said. They could do that for themselves. But wouldn’t it be fun to all meet up in Cobh even for a couple of nights together?

  Lindy had come into the office one morning to find her father looking through the latest email from Fintan in the Cobh hotel, asking about the reunion plans. She’d finished another Gillespie cushion – her tenth – and wanted to know if there was any point in doing more.

  She’d asked what he was doing. He showed her all of Fintan’s emails. In his latest one Fintan had attached information about the heritage walks in the town, as well as a list of museums, restaurants and craft shops.

  ‘That looks like fun. Let me email him back for you,’ she said. So she had. Fintan had emailed her back. They’d spoken on the phone. Then started skyping. Nick and the others were now lucky if they managed to get on to the computer at all.

  Lindy had also started playing a lot of Irish music around the house. Not folk songs. Fintan and his girlfriend played part-time in a band. An indie one, not a traditional one. It also turned out his parents owned the waterfront hotel. He was only working there until he’d earned enough money to give their band a go full-time, he’d told Lindy. Luckily, there was always work in the hotel, especially in the summer, when Cobh was jammed with tourists. She should think about coming over sometime, he said. Not just to help organise the Gillespie reunion. His parents would definitely give her work. She wouldn’t even need a visa, with her mother being English. She could apply for a UK passport. Lindy thought it was a brilliant idea. Fintan was full of good ideas, it seemed. They’d all heard a lot about them.

  Closer to home, there was still no sign of mining machinery moving on to Errigal. The Gillespies had, however, finalised their lease arrangement with the Lawsons. It would begin in the new year. Nick had also met with the mining company’s lawyers regarding the caretaker clause he’d signed. He would stay on until the end of December. The role would then be taken over by Fred Lawson.

  Fred had big plans for new breeding programs on Errigal. While he was setting those up, he could easily manage the caretaking role on the hectares leased to the mining company. It would also make sense for him to live on site. The Errigal homestead was large. There was plenty of room for him to live there. And as Genevieve said, Fred would be spending so much time on Errigal visiting Victoria, he may as well move in permanently.

  Victoria was continuing to work part-time at the radio station, but she’d also taken on a new role. She wasn’t just helping Angela with her station-stay business. She’d virtually taken it over. She’d already updated the website, with Ig’s help. She’d hosted four different couples, from the US, Germany, Sweden and Italy. She’d also announced ideas to expand it over the next year or two. She and Fred were going to do up the shearers’ quarters, turn them into what they were calling ‘boutique rustic accommodation’. She had ideas to expand their tours too, to include more information about the birdlife, the geology, the Aboriginal history. Offer gourmet dinners each night. Fred seemed to be closely involved in all her ideas.

  Nick hadn’t been happy about the two of them living together without being married. Angela had talked him around. It was clear to everyone that it was serious between Victoria and Fred. And just as clear that they would get married one day. But not yet. When it suited them.

  And as Victoria said, it meant there would still be a Gillespie on Errigal.

  ‘One of us has to stay living up here, or Joan will pine,’ she said.

  Joan wasn’t going anywhere, she’d told Angela. ‘Glenn says he’ll only be carried out of here. I feel the same. But rent a house with a big spare room, won’t you? And put my name on the door.’

  Everyone now knew about their plans to leave Errigal after Christmas. With the help of the Lawsons’ lease money, Nick, Angela and Ig were going to rent a house in Adelaide as close to the sea as they could afford. Nick was thinking about studying again. A history degree, he hoped. Angela had looked into photography courses. They’d also had early discussions with a school in Adelaide known for its excellence in computer education. It ran a scholarship program for children showing exceptional IT ability. Ig had already been assessed and invited to apply.

  They would be applying. But not yet.

  They were having an adventure first. Nick, Angela and Ig. They were hiring a campervan and taking off on a three-month trip around Australia, leaving in early January. They’d already cleared the time off school with Ig’s teachers. They didn’t have a set itinerary. They were going to make it up as they went along. See as much as they could. Ig couldn’t wait. He’d already set up a website. He was going to write a weekly blog about their travels, so Joan, Celia and his sisters could see what they were doing. His mum was going to take the photos for it.

  He didn’t know yet if Robbie would be coming with them. His friend still hadn’t returned, but Ig was confident he would.

  ‘Do you miss him?’ Genevieve had asked when they’d been walking up to Swing Hill, a few days before she flew to Toronto to start working on Matt’s new film.

  ‘No,’ Ig said. ‘I think about him instead. That’s nearly as good as having him here.’

  They were carrying a pot of paint with them. Genevieve had decided not to wait until she died to bequeath her swing to Ig. They were adding his name underneath hers on the middle one.

  Matt hadn’t set his film in South Australia or Western Australia. The Canadian government had given him much better tax exemptions and the landscape was just as empty. It wasn’t a film about zombie rabbits. He’d been sworn to secrecy while he was doing the location scouting. It was a big-budget historical drama starring two Oscar-winning actors. The director was his Emmy Award–winning brother. There was a cast of dozens and a crew of hundreds, including five make-up artists and four hairdressers. Megan was one of the make-up artists. Genevieve was one of the hairdressers. It would have been difficult for her to get work in the US, but Canada was a different story. Especially when she was being sponsored by a large film company whose production manager happened to be her boyfriend. Matt’s brother had also forgiven her. Matt had told him he had no choice.

  Lindy finally emerged from the office. They were right. She had been skyping Ireland.

  It was time for the grand unveiling. A green tarpaulin had been stretched across the wall of the shed. Ig stood on one side, Angela on the other. On the count of three, they pulled at the ropes. The tarpaulin fell down in a heap.

  ‘Ta-da!’ Ig said.

  The mural was revealed in all its bird and gum-tree glory. Ig had done all the drawings. Angela had helped him colour them in. There was an almost-recognisable blue wren. A not very recognisable galah, kookaburra and cockatoo. An odd-shaped emu and a wedge-tailed eagle with oversized wings that looked more like a pterodactyl. Everyone showered Ig with praise. They already knew he was better on the computer than he was at drawing birds. In the right-hand corner, so small they nearly missed it, was a robin. Underneath it, Ig and Angela had signed their names.

  It’s FANTASTIC! Genevieve emailed back wh
en Victoria sent her the photos. But tell Ig from me – he still REALLY needs a haircut.

  EPILOGUE

  It was December the first.

  Nick was in the office on Errigal. He typed the last sentence and then called out to his son. ‘Ready when you are, Ig.’

  It was now less than five weeks until they left on their big trip around Australia. He and Angela were going to start packing soon. Ig had finished weeks before. His bag was already by the front door.

  They would all be packing again in eight months’ time. For their trip to Ireland for the Gillespie reunion. Two weeks earlier, they’d been given a surprise. While Nick was in Adelaide visiting Celia in her new home, she’d presented him with a cheque. A big cheque. Enough to cover their travel costs to Ireland. More than that. Enough for Nick, Angela and Ig to go travelling for a month or two afterwards. To London. To France. To Italy. Wherever they decided to go together.

  ‘I can’t take this,’ Nick had said. ‘You’ve already been generous enough to Lindy.’

  ‘You can take it and you will,’ Celia had said. ‘You’ve always been kind to me, Nick. You and your family. I want you to have it.’

  As Nick waited for Ig and Angela to join him in the office, he keyed in the final address. His email would be going to the two hundred Gillespies attending the reunion. It was the draft plan for their three-day gathering, with a link to the Cobh hotel’s website. It was the last email Nick would be sending them. Lindy would be the contact person from now on. It made sense. She was there on the ground in Cobh, after all.

  She’d flown to Ireland in late July, her ticket paid for by Celia. Her cushion material had followed by ship. They still heard from her nearly every day. She was having the time of her life, she said. Fintan, his family, his girlfriend and their friends were so great, so welcoming, so creative. She’d already fallen in love twice. Irishmen were gorgeous, she said. She’d found her calling in hotel work, it seemed. She did a bit of everything: waitressing, cleaning, barwork, reception. No two days were the same. She was in regular contact with Celia as well. Before she left, she’d helped Celia buy an iPad. They played online Scrabble with each other every day. Lindy often skyped her for business advice too.

  Ig came into the office. Angela was with him. She stayed at the door.

  Nick turned and smiled at her. ‘You sure you don’t want to take over? You know what date it is?’

  ‘I’m staying right back here,’ Angela said. She’d already announced several weeks earlier that she wouldn’t be sending any more Christmas letters.

  Ig cut and pasted the link to the Cobh hotel, tested it, and declared the email ready to go.

  ‘What do you want to put in the subject line?’ he asked his dad. ‘“Plans for the reunion”?’

  ‘I was thinking of something different,’ Nick said. He told them what it was. ‘If you don’t mind me borrowing it?’ he asked Angela.

  ‘It’s all yours,’ she said with a smile.

  Nick keyed it into the subject line. Hello from the Gillespies.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked Ig.

  ‘Ready,’ Ig said.

  They pressed the send button together.

  Acknowledgements

  My warmest thanks to the many people who helped my research for Hello from the Gillespies.

  Keryn Hilder and Henry Hilder for all the detail about station life in the Flinders Ranges.

  My brother Paul McInerney for his on-the-ground tour guiding and research help, and my research assistant and niece Ruby Clements and my mother Mary McInerney for accompanying me on my research trip.

  Dublin-based neurologist Siobhan Hutchinson for the information about confabulation and brain injury and for reading my early chapters, and Dr Deirdre Coyle in Dublin for answering my many other medical research questions.

  Louise Ní Chríodáin for background on radio stations, and also the team at LM FM in Drogheda, County Louth: Gerry Kelly, Louise Ferriter, Deirdre Hurley, Brian Curran and Aaron McNicholas.

  Noreen Murphy and Catherine O’Connor, for their insights into life as a twin. Tom Walsh and Deirdre Mac Giolla Rí for their insights into being the parents of twins-plus-one.

  Robyn Bramich in Latrobe, Tasmania; Deborah Costello in Dublin and once again, Keryn Hilder, for their hairdresser tales.

  My brother Rob McInerney for the loan of his imaginary friend from childhood.

  Rachel Crawford for sharing details of being an Australian in New York.

  Hello from the Gillespies is a work of fiction. Any errors of fact are mine, and not the fault of any of the people above, who helped me so generously.

  For their help in all sorts of other ways, thank you to Austin O’Neill, Sinéad Moriarty, Noëlle Harrison, Murray Sheehan, Sarah Duffy, Clare Forster, Susan Owens, Margie and Mark Arnold of Meg’s Bookshop in Port Pirie, John Neville, Stephanie Dickenson, Maria Dickenson, Sarah Conroy, Brona Looby, Sabine Brasseler, Karen O’Connor, Bart Meldau, Frances Brennan, Ashley Miller, Frances Whaley, Kristin Gill, James Williams and Justin Tabari.

  My three publishers: everyone at Penguin Australia, especially Ali Watts, Arwen Summers, Saskia Adams, Gabrielle Coyne, Ben Ball, Peter Blake, Lou Ryan, Sally Bateman, Chantelle Sturt and Greg Cormack. At Penguin UK: Maxine Hitchcock, Clare Bowron, Lydia Good, Katie Sheldrake and Joe Yule. At Penguin US/New American Library: Kara Welsh, Craig Burke, Ellen Edwards and Diana Kirkland.

  My agents: Fiona Inglis of Curtis Brown Australia; Jonathan Lloyd of Curtis Brown UK and Gráinne Fox at Fletcher & Co in New York.

  My two families: the McInerneys in Australia and the Drislanes in Ireland and Germany.

  And, as always, my love and thanks to my husband John and my sister Maura for everything they do to help me write each novel.

  SPOILER ALERT: The conversation with Monica McInerney and the book club notes that follow tell more about what happens in the book than you might want to know until after you read it.

  Q. Hello from the Gillespies begins with a Christmas letter gone awry and includes a main character, Angela, who suffers from a rare form of amnesia. Did these unusual ideas inspire the book, or did some other aspect of the novel come first?

  A. My starting point was the Christmas letter. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of them since I was a child. My parents used to receive quite a few each year and I remember being astonished at how much detail people would write about their lives, and how perfect these other families’ lives seemed. The year I turned seventeen, we received one particular letter that was so over the top about the family’s achievements that my sister and I felt compelled to write our own parody version. We called it ‘The McInerney Report’ and filled it with breathlessly elaborate (and false) entries about all nine members of our family – our charity work, our exotic international travel, how we had won the bid to host the Olympics in our small hometown . . . We had so much fun doing it, we produced an annual one for the next ten years. It was never circulated – we definitely wrote it for our family’s eyes only!

  I suspect that planted the seed to somehow use a Christmas letter in my fiction writing. In 2009, I wrote a short story called Elizabeth’s News about a widowed woman in her sixties who deliberately invents an adventurous, false life for herself in her annual letter to amuse herself and her readers. She gives herself a husband and two daughters, talks about trips on the Orient Express, a Mediterranean cruise, and she even climbs Mount Kilimanjaro. Two years ago, I happened to reread it, and it got me thinking about the flip side – what if someone wrote a completely truthful letter for once? And what if – someway, somehow – it got sent out? Once I’d had that thought, I knew I had the starting point for a whole novel.

  Angela’s form of amnesia came to me later in the writing process. After the bombshell of her private Christmas letter and her fantasy life going public, I wanted to take her out of her family for a period of time, to see how they coped without the wife and mother they thought they knew. I considered different possibilities, including having her go aw
ay or even fall ill and be in a coma. But I missed her so much. I needed to rethink that idea and somehow find a way to keep her present but also apart from her family. In perfect timing, I met a neurologist called Siobhan Hutchinson here in Dublin who introduced me to the idea of confabulation. She was a treasure trove of detail, and helped me so much.

  Q. The novel explores family members who are at different life stages: Ig is navigating school, the three daughters are trying to figure out their careers and love lives, and Angela and Nick are working on their marriage. Was that a deliberate choice or a natural by-product of the characters you wanted to bring to life?

  A. It was a deliberate choice. I am so intrigued by family life, in reality and in my fiction – all those different personalities under one roof, so many people at different stages in their lives; it’s a miracle anyone gets on with one another at all. With this novel, I particularly wanted to explore the relationship between a couple trying to keep their marriage on track while also dealing with all the emotions and responsibilities of being parents and running a station. In Angela’s case, how can you be a wife when your time is taken up with being a mother? In Nick’s case, how do you cope with depression and still be a husband and father? I also wanted to write about adult children coming home to live again, how they revert to being kids, but also how they must come to the realisation that their parents have their own lives, hopes and emotions too – that they are not simply Mum and Dad. And in the middle of them all, there’s Ig, still a child but living his own form of a fantasy life.

  Q. You split your time between your native Australia and Ireland, where your husband grew up. How did that experience influence the novel?