Sometimes I know best. You’ll feel better in the morning.
I didn’t, though, and nor did Mum.
‘I don’t care about breakfast,’ she said when I asked. ‘I just want to get out of here.’
‘But the owner’s not around yet. You said we’d see the parrots.’
‘I can’t help that,’ Mum said. ‘I can’t make the parrots turn up at a time that suits us. They turn up in their own time.’
‘You said we’d see them.’
‘I said we’d see them if.’
‘If what?’
‘If we were lucky. We’re not lucky, so we won’t see them.’ Mum slammed the boot shut and turned to me. Her face was a blank mask. ‘Get in, Mimi, and stop making such a childish fuss.’
‘Where are we going now?’
‘We’re just going, okay? Up the coast somewhere.’
‘Are we going to have breakfast?’
‘When we find somewhere with good coffee.’
I couldn’t believe it. We’d had baked beans for dinner, but we had to wait for good coffee for breakfast. Mum hadn’t put on her big sunglasses and her eyes looked squinchy in the bright morning light, as though they were strangely naked.
‘Like coffee’s so important,’ I muttered.
‘It is, Mimi. Coffee is so important.’
We drove in silence to the next town where we stopped at a bakery with a promising-looking coffee machine. I had a croissant. After all that trouble I wasn’t going to just have toast. The croissant was okay. Mum’s cafe latte wasn’t. I knew as soon as I saw the woman bring it over that it wouldn’t be. It was too pale. Mum sent it back. Twice. Then she got up and supervised the machine herself. I cringed and picked croissant flakes off my jumper.
‘You shouldn’t do that,’ I hissed at her when she finally sat down again.
‘Shouldn’t do what?’ Her eyes narrowed into little cat-slits. She glowered at me and then took a sip of her coffee and I watched her expression change completely. It was as if all the muscles in her face relaxed.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, pleating my napkin. ‘Nothing.’
‘I’m going to change my life, Mimi,’ she said. ‘I have to work out who I really am. Am I the kind of person who cares about her coffee? Or am I the sort of person who’d order tea, rather than make a fuss?’
Considering the whole coffee episode, I couldn’t work out why she was asking.
‘You make a fuss,’ I said.
‘I always have in the past,’ Mum said. ‘But now’s the time I can change.’
‘How past is five minutes ago? You just made a fuss, Mum,’ I said. ‘You went and showed them how to use the coffee machine. That’s a fuss.’
‘A lapse,’ Mum said, waving her hand delicately in the air, as though testing the temperature.
I looked at the staff who were grouped together nervously at the counter. ‘At least they can make coffee now,’ I said.
Mum turned and the staff ducked when she looked at them. ‘You can only try,’ she murmured. ‘Sometimes everything is against you.’
‘So,’ I said desperately, ‘how are things going to change?’
‘Not things,’ Mum said. ‘Me. I’m going to change. I’m going to become more confident, more assertive, more visible. Take my life into my own hands. Our lives. You’ll see.’
‘I don’t like it when things change,’ I said.
Mum shrugged and the hairs trapped on her jacket collar spun in the mild light. ‘Buck up, Mimi.’
‘What are we going to do now?’ I knew a whiny tone was creeping into my voice, but I was worried. I liked Mum the way she was. The coffee fixation could go – that kind of change wouldn’t worry me – but it sounded bigger than that.
‘We’ll drive on up the coast,’ Mum said. ‘We’re not in New South Wales yet.’
‘Will there be a hotel this time?’ I asked, crossing my fingers under the table.
‘There’s sure to be a hotel,’ Mum said. ‘I want to buy a notebook. I’ll write down all the things that need to change, and you can watch television.’
‘Can I have a notebook, too?’
‘I suppose so,’ Mum said. ‘It’s important to get just the right one, so don’t be disappointed if we don’t find it quickly.’
It took three towns to find the right notebooks. I found a perfect one in the very first newsagency, but Mum vetoed it because it had lines ruled in it and she said that would stunt my creativity.
‘I don’t want to be creative,’ I wailed. ‘I just want this one.’ It had an old shipwreck on the cover and I loved it. But Mum wasn’t going to buy it under any circumstances.
I sulked through the next town, but she wouldn’t even let me stay in the car.
‘We’re doing this together, Mimi,’ she said.
We didn’t find a notebook there, either, but Mum did buy glossy magazines. Three of them.
‘What do you want these for?’ I asked as she bundled them on to my lap in the car.
‘I want to see how the rest of the world lives,’ Mum said. ‘Your father hated glossies. I used to read them at the hairdresser’s while he was alive. Now I can buy them and nobody will say anything.’
‘They just make you want things you can’t afford,’ I said, remembering what Dad had said.
‘Shut up, Mimi. Please.’ She said it gently, but it still hurt. How was this doing anything together? I was just a little dinghy she was pulling along in her wake.
Don’t get snarly, Ableth whispered from his crow’s nest.
The notebook I wanted had a shipwreck on it, I told him. It was perfect for a pirate queen.
Most pirate queens I know can’t write anyway. Ableth grinned. Writing’s just not that useful an accomplishment if you steal for a living.
Well, I’m different, Ableth. Don’t you have any real work to do?
I’m doing it, Cap’n, Ableth said, still grinning . Keeping an eye on you.
I don’t need you to keep an eye on me.
I beg to differ, Cap’n. I think you need my eyes more than you know.
He wouldn’t talk after that so I riffled through the magazines Mum had bought as we drove along.
‘There’s a handbag in here that’s worth over a thousand dollars,’ I told her.
‘Worth?’
‘That’s what they’re selling it for.’
‘Maybe you’d only need that one for the rest of your life,’ Mum said after a while. ‘Maybe it would magically be the perfect handbag for all occasions. Then it would be a bargain.’
‘It wouldn’t work like that, Mum. Anyway, it’s navy and you hate navy.’
‘You’re right. It wouldn’t work like that. Nothing is ever perfect.’ She made it sound as though it was my fault.
The notebooks she finally found at the next stop, however, were perfect – according to her.
‘Look, Mimi, they’re just what we need.’
It wasn’t what I needed. I needed a ship on the cover, but this one was plain bluey-green.
‘That’s silk,’ Mum said running her finger across the cover.
‘But it’s bumpy.’
Mum nodded, ‘Not slinky silk, but slubby silk,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful, Mimi, and look – no lines!’
‘It hasn’t got a picture of a shipwreck on it,’ I pointed out.
‘You could draw a shipwreck inside,’ Mum said, but she didn’t sound cross anymore. ‘You could fill it with pictures of shipwrecks, because it doesn’t have any lines. You do want it, don’t you, Mimi?’
I did and I didn’t. ‘I suppose it’s almost sea-coloured,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ Mum said quickly. ‘You get the sea-coloured one and I’ll get this tangerine one.’ She picked up an orange notebook with the same cover.
‘I love this. It looks so bright, so full of possibilities.’ Her voice was wistful. She didn’t even look at the price on the back, just handed over her credit card.
They were beautiful notebooks. In a way, too beautiful, I thought. How could I write inside something like that? What if my drawing was utterly lame and I wanted to rip it out?
‘I can’t wait,’ Mum said. ‘We’ll just push on to Batemans Bay and find a hotel there. This is a good thing, Mimi. I’m itching to start my new life.’
We found a motel on the outskirts of Batemans Bay. There was a fenced-off swimming pool surrounded by big, flat-leaved plants and banana lounges. There was even a spa.
‘This will do,’ Mum said. ‘This will be fine.’
They gave us a key for an upstairs room, so we even had a funny little balcony with a little table and two chairs on it.
‘Perfect,’ Mum said. ‘I can sit out here and write and watch you swim at the same time.’
‘We’re going to the beach, though, aren’t we?’ I said.
‘Of course, Mimi. We’ll take long beach walks. Good for the soul.’
It was starting to sound more like what I had imagined. If I forgot for a moment or two that Dad was dead, I could even believe this was a proper holiday. There was a television you could watch from bed and a tiny kitchenette where you could make toasted sandwiches and tea. I unpacked all my things carefully into the second-top drawer and hung my dress and my spare jeans in the wardrobe. Mum just threw her suitcase on to a chair.
‘I can unpack any time,’ she said, catching my look. ‘I want to start planning.’
She set herself up on the balcony table with a pot of tea, some pens and pencils and her notebook. She was wearing her sunglasses again. ‘You can go swimming, if you like.’
It was boring in the pool all by myself. For a while I pretended to swim with dolphins. Then I decided to be an Olympic diver and practised diving until I did a belly whacker that made the water slop over the sides of the pool.
That must have hurt.
A bit, I admitted . I’m bored, Ableth. What should I do?
You should go and keep your mum company. She needs you.
I looked up at the balcony. Mum wasn’t even watching the pool. I could see her hand moving quickly as she wrote in the tangerine notebook.
She doesn’t seem to. She’s not even watching me. I could be drowning and she wouldn’t know.
But you’re a great swimmer, Ableth said. A pirate queen has to be. She’s not worried about you drowning.
She doesn’t need me, I said stubbornly. Look at her, Ableth. She’s writing down all the changes she wants to make now that my dad’s died. It’s not fair. She doesn’t even need him.
Ableth sighed. You need to learn to look under the surface of things, he said. Look at water. It’s just a great expanse of blue with little wavelets and riffs of foam. If you don’t look underneath. Underneath that surface are whole worlds full of wonder. Fierce battles are fought, lives lost, new lives born. There are treasures and wrecks and bones. You’d see none of that just looking at the blue.
Mum’s not an ocean, I said.
People are just as mysterious, Ableth said, and then he disappeared.
I went up shortly after that anyway. Not because I thought Mum needed me, but because it was just too boring being in the pool all by myself. I was right, though. Mum hardly looked at me when I went out to the table. She kept scribbling away.
‘Nice swim?’ she asked without raising her head.
‘It was okay. Are you going to come in?’
‘Not at the moment,’ Mum said. ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’
So much for Ableth’s theory!
I spent the rest of the afternoon curled up in bed watching television while Mum sat on the balcony, writing. When she finally came inside she looked at me properly for the first time since we’d been there.
‘In bed, Mimi? Are you sick again?’
‘There was nothing else to do,’ I said. ‘You were busy.’
‘Yes, yes. I was. I’m sorry, Mimi. There are just some things I have to do. Are you hungry? Want to explore the beach?’
On the beach, though, Mum became very quiet and I knew she was thinking and remembering the same things as me. Dad loved the beach, he loved poking around in the sea weed and rock pools. He’d stride along singing sea shanties. He could sit for an hour and just watch the water. Sometimes they both would and I’d come out of the waves to find them exactly where I’d left them, Mum’s head on Dad’s shoulder, just watching and talking quietly. Other times he’d leap down the beach with me and dive into the cold water faster than ever I could and come spluttering up to splash me until I had to dive under too.
‘What do you do with a drunken sailor,’ Mum started to sing in a low voice. ‘What do you do with a drunken sailor early in the morning?’
I joined in and soon we were striding up the beach singing at the top of our voices, tears from the wind and our sadness streaking down our faces. We were holding hands so we couldn’t wipe them away. We both just blinked them out of our eyes and went on singing.
The wind caught our song and whipped it away, out to the sea which looked like a great blue expanse, just as Ableth had said. Little ruffles of foam were kicked up further out and bigger waves crashed close to shore. That was all you could see on the surface, but underneath, I knew there were wrecks and treasure. There were silvery blind fish no one had named yet, way way down. And there were fish bones, whale skeletons, sailors’ skulls and the great ribs of old ships. Even when a heart stopped, the sea went on forever.
We went home two days sooner than Mum had planned. She rang the aunts and told them we were coming home and that they could go – we’d be back to open the shop on Saturday. We couldn’t say it, but being away wasn’t the same without Dad. Mum had lists for her future – they spilled out everywhere. She wrote things down on café napkins and old coasters and then rewrote them in her journal. I wasn’t certain they made her happier.
I wrote pirate adventures down in mine. Ableth on paper sounded very different from the Ableth I heard in my head. I made him more handsome, for a start. I gave him fiercely blue eyes and dark, curly hair tied back in a little ponytail. He adored Queen Griselda, the pirate queen.
But I adore you, Ableth whispered, I do, I do.
Oh, go away, can’t you see I’m busy! I was trying to write a bit more of the sea description before Mum said I had to put my book in the bag and jump in because we were going.
We didn’t stay at Cann River on the way back. Mum was so determined to get home she just kept driving. We pulled into a garage for fuel, a drive-through Macca’s for lunch, another one later on for dinner and finally one for coffee for Mum and apple pie for me.
‘My bottom’s sore,’ I told her.
‘Wiggle it around.’
‘My eyes hurt from staring at the trees whizzing past all the time. They’re giving me a headache.’
‘Close your eyes then, silly.’
‘My neck’s cricked,’ I said, ‘from always having it at one side.’
‘Lean it towards the other side, then.’
‘There is no other side with a window,’ I pointed out sharply.
‘Mimi, I just want to get home now. I’m every bit as uncomfortable as you are. My eyes hurt, my bottom’s sore and my back aches.’
‘Why are we in such a rush all of a sudden?’ I asked. ‘Why can’t we just go home when we’d planned to? Or, if we have to go now, why can’t we stay somewhere on the way home like we did on the way up. Mum?’
‘I don’t know,’ she answered, her eyes on the road ahead. ‘I don’t know, Mimi. I just know I want to get home. That’s all.’
‘Do you think something bad’s happened?’
‘Something b
igger than bad has already happened,’ she said.
‘I meant to the aunts?’
‘One of them would have rung. No, I don’t think anything bad’s happened. I just want to sleep in my own bed.’
It didn’t seem a good enough reason for rushing us through one state and into another, but I shut up and wiggled, stretched and yawned as quietly as I could. I couldn’t even write in my pirate book. Writing while the car was going was nearly impossible. I leant my head back, closed my eyes and dreamt about me and Ableth, sailing together.
I didn’t feel the dream go from daydream to a proper dream, but it must have because Ableth turned into Dad and the great sailing ship I usually imagined became a leaky dinghy Dad and I had to row to get somewhere very important, but we only had one oar and Dad kept doing it wrongly, so we never went forward, only backwards. He was singing and swigging something from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag and the water was coming in the dinghy and wetting my feet and then, before I could do anything, he’d flipped out of the dinghy and was riding on the back of a huge turtle, away from me. I called out, but he didn’t hear me and I watched as the turtle slowly sank, and Dad with it.
I woke up, wanting to cry. My mother was shaking me gently.
‘We’re here,’ she whispered. ‘We’re home.’
I clutched at her, but she just laughed, ‘You’ve been dreaming, Mimi. You’ve been asleep for miles and miles. Come on, stretch a bit and then hop out.’
I wanted to tell her about Dad and the turtle, but she started to unpack the car and I knew that she wouldn’t really want to hear about anything I’d dreamt about Dad. It would make her too unhappy. I unloaded my backpack and dragged it to the front door.
‘Where are the aunts?’ I asked sleepily.
‘Safely in their own beds. Oh, Mimi – isn’t it wonderful to see the shop again?’ She unlocked the door and breathed in, as though she’d just stepped into her garden.
‘Aunty Marita’s been burning incense,’ I said, rather unnecessarily.
‘She certainly has,’ Mum didn’t sound pleased. ‘I wonder what else the sisters have got up to while we’ve been away.’
Mimi and the Blue Slave Page 4