Behind the door’s stained-glass window stood the large form of a man. It must be one of the builders, perhaps Gizbo, come to welcome her and finalise anything that needed doing. She swung the door open, a big smile on her pretty face. Then she froze.
‘Amos?’
He stood before her, tall, broad, grown utterly into manhood. His big square hands held a bunch of flowers, freshly picked from Gwinnie’s garden. Tara recognised the blooms instantly.
‘Welcome home, Tars,’ he said with a grin.
Goosebumps prickled Tara’s skin. She felt tears rise in her eyes, then she began to laugh. She raised a hand to her mouth and saw it was shaking. Her heart drummed loudly in her chest. ‘Amos! How did you know I’d be here? Did Gwinnie tell you?’
He grinned even more, enticing dimples to his cheeks. ‘Mum? No. How would she know?’
Tara gave an innocent shrug of her shoulders.
‘Hey, you’re not the only one with psychic powers round here,’ he said as he stepped forwards and gave her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Once the abattoir house was bulldozed, I knew. I just knew it. I also asked Gizbo when he came to get fuel for the drive back to Sydney. He gave nothing away, but I could tell from his expression my questions were on the right track.’
‘I thought you had a no-gossip policy at the servo?’
Amos chuckled. ‘You got me on that one. Time for a cuppa?’
‘Got nothin’ to do . . .’ Tara began.
‘And all day to do it.’ Amos laughed outright.
A cloud of memory crossed the room as simultaneously they pictured that day at the Goldsborough billabong — and Elsie. They looked searchingly at each other, then Tara stepped aside and gestured to the kitchen. ‘You can have a cuppa, if I can find a kettle and some tea.’
Amos fished around in his back pocket and handed her a cellophane package. ‘Mum’s homemade lemon and ginger. She said to say hi and dinner’s at our place if you want.’
She looked at him incredulously. ‘You sneaky peeps.’
‘You were coming around to visit me anyway, weren’t you?’ Amos teased.
Tara took the flowers and the tea from Amos, smiling up at him, drinking in his perfection. The way his black hair flopped over his forehead. His kind dark eyes. The honest man’s hands that still had oil in their fingerprints, even though Tara knew he would’ve spent a long time scrubbing them clean. Just for her.
‘Wow,’ Amos said, looking around the beautiful hallway singing with golden afternoon light before he moved towards the kitchen. ‘This house is just how I imagined it. Only more beautiful. Mr Queen must’ve loved it here. No wonder he barely left it. It’s so beautiful compared to the rest of Culvert.’
Tara smiled with gratitude. Amos wasn’t making this some grand romantic reunion like she’d dreaded and dreamed about for years. He wasn’t even commenting on how much weight she’d lost or how changed she was, like most people would around Culvert when they saw her. Instead he had simply stepped right into the moment of now and was here with her.
Tara beamed up at him. It was just how it ought to be.
‘Now, speaking of Culvert and beautiful,’ she began, ‘I have a cunning plan you might be interested in . . .’
Fifty
It was a sunny spring evening at the Culvert Council offices and in exactly one hour and eight minutes the staff were due to go home. The days were shortening and the sun was tipping lower in the sky, casting beautiful light on the ugly brickwork of the building. Many of the staff were thinking of what they might have for dinner, or watch on midweek television that night, but not Councillor-Mayor Kelvin Jones. He was watching his secretary-receptionist, Christine Sheen, who was bending to empty her wastepaper basket, in a skirt so short it almost showed her Bear Grylls. This simple sight was making Kelvin’s heart race.
Suddenly Councillor-Mayor Jones’s eyelids fluttered, he clutched his chest, and he keeled over, dead, right there and then on the new purple-and-yellow carpet, which had taken the council seven meetings to choose. In his podgy hand was the resubmission of the sewage-plant funding proposal and, as he fell, the paper scattered into disarray like runaway dreams.
Fellow councillor Tammie Donningham, coming out of her office, had the presence of mind to call the ambulance and police, while Christine stood there screaming, looking down at the giant body of her boss, his bodily fluids leaking out of him. On hearing the screaming, Deputy Mayor Cuthbertson Rogerson came out of his office, assessed the situation and scuttled off home around the block to find his wife, Zelda, who was a nurse. It would be quicker than waiting for the Nicholson boy, who was the Rington paramedic, or Dr Patak, who now moved almost as slowly as a corpse himself.
When Tammie had put down the phone to the ambulance service, she slapped Christine on the face to shut her up, then, with gritted teeth, rolled her sleeves and quelling her nausea, kneeled to begin CPR on what felt like a blue whale.
In a matter of minutes around the block, Constable Gilbert’s pager was beeping urgently from trousers that lay on the floor of Deputy Mayor Rogerson’s bedroom. Constable Gilbert frowned, trying to block out the incessant beeping as he rogered into Zelda Rogerson on the Deputy Mayor’s king-sized waterbed. Zelda, on her back, grabbed the constable’s buttocks harder. It took less than thirty seconds for Constable Gilbert to blow his load, roll off, slap Zelda on her sizeable rump and drag his undies back on.
‘Police business, darlin’,’ he said. ‘Gotta go.’ Outside, his squad-car radio was alive with questions as to his whereabouts. The Rington radio room was demanding he get to the council offices toot-sweet. But he’d only got as far as the en suite when, half-mast-trousered, Constable Gilbert came face-to-face with the Deputy Mayor. Zelda drew up the sheets around her pink body and cried out in shock.
Following this chain of events, it took less than fifteen minutes for the news of Elsie’s father’s death to arrive to the outskirts of town where Tara was sitting at an outdoor table in the backyard of the Smiths’ garden, enjoying the starters of what would be a wonderful meal with Gwinnie, Amos and Elvis. But there, before the news of the mayor’s death made it to them, they were about to get another shock.
Normally the western-plains bus from Sydney, which for reasons lost in the mists of time included Culvert on its itinerary, stopped in the next town, as no one ever seemed to want to get off in Culvert, but tonight it pulled up. The Smiths and Tara heard the gush of air brakes and the rumble of the idling engine. They looked at each other, perplexed.
Next, around the side of the house came Zac, his backpack looped over one shoulder, his clothes crushed like Indiana Jones’s, plaited cotton bands on one wrist, his hair, his everything looking dishevelled but still gloriously handsome, despite his scarred face.
Gwinnie cried out and cried; Elvis too. Amos beamed. Tara nodded, knowing it was all about to unfold as it should.
‘Brother! Father! Mother! Friend!’ he called out. Dropping his pack, Zac opened up his arms and enfolded them in a giant group hug.
‘My God!’ Gwinnie said, drawing back and cupping his face in both hands. ‘Such a surprise! Why didn’t you let us know?’
‘Someone did know.’ Zac grinned as he looked at his brother. ‘Someone paid for my ticket.’
He slung his arm around Amos and deep laughter escaped both of them.
Then Zac’s eyes travelled back to Tara. He lifted her up and twirled her around. She laughed, looking down at him.
‘Hello, Tars!’
‘You smell like goats, old shoes and saffron rice!’ she said. ‘Good adventures? I was just hearing about you in Haiti.’
He set her down. ‘Well, I ain’t in Haiti now.’
Then they all stood about, joy flooding them, all feeling the stars align once more over Culvert for them.
Before they could talk more, the bell of the service station chimed as a car pulled in. Amos excused himself, casting a gentle smile at Tara as he left and giving his brother a happy shove.
Gwinnie an
d Elvis stood, glowing, beaming, smiling at the sight of their son. He was here. After seven years, home!
Zac nodded at the barbecue meat that was set under a cloth. ‘Got enough for me? I’m starving!’
‘Yes!’ Gwinnie said, snapping awake. ‘Of course! I’ll get the rest.’ She hugged him again, then practically danced away, calling over her shoulder, ‘Elvis, give me a hand in the kitchen, love. The boy needs feeding up.’
After another hug from Elvis, Zac plonked himself down under the blissful shade of a wisteria bursting with new green leaves, helped himself to the big jug of water and looked at Tara. ‘It’s so good to see you,’ he said.
‘You too!’ She nodded at his face and touched her own. ‘Is that it? It’s not as bad as I imagined.’
Zac laughed mildly, holding out his hand and indicating the smooth red welt that ran along the back of it and up over his arm. The skin was white, taut and hairless compared to his other tanned arm. Then he touched his face. ‘It’s no big deal. Can only grow half a beard so I look like a half-skinned rabbit if I don’t shave for a few days.’
Tara smiled. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘It used to. Then only my ego hurt. Haiti changed all that. The poverty there, Tara.’ His eyes clouded with memories.
‘Put it in perspective, did it?’
He nodded and looked down at Gwinnie’s brightly patterned cloth table napkins. He shrugged one broad shoulder. ‘I’m a lucky guy. Working for the Cleanagain biomethane company has restored my faith in humanity’s future. And you, Tars? You look wonderful.’
‘The external is merely a reflection of the internal,’ Tara said. ‘Most of me is healed. It only took me every day of my life to do it. And I still have to work on it every day. And even then I still have the scars on the inside. Sometimes, often in fact, at night when I’m on my own, which is all the time, they rip and tear a little.’
She said her words with a touch of flint. Zac’s eyes narrowed in pity as he frowned.
‘Dwaine?’
Tara nodded. A fly buzzed by.
‘We were never sure. Should we have done more for you?’ Zac asked quietly.
Tara dismissed his notion, shaking her head. ‘What used to happen in that house isn’t important any more . . . it’s past. It’s up to me to not be a victim. It’s up to me to heal myself. No one else. And I’m getting there. Still a loner, though.’
Zac grimaced. ‘That’s no good. You’re a champion, Tara, and you don’t deserve to be alone. You deserve a good bloke. And I think I know of one.’ He indicated his head in the direction Amos had gone.
Tara shot him a glance. ‘That’s the past too.’
‘Yes, it is. Maybe it’s up to both of us to fully forgive some other people too so it can become the present and even the future in your case?’ he suggested.
Tara looked at him enquiringly. ‘You mean Amos and Elsie?’
Zac nodded. ‘Did she ever tell you what really happened between them?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean? I saw. They were together. You couldn’t get much more together.’
‘Ah!’ Zac said, lifting a finger. ‘But they weren’t. Amos stopped himself at the last minute. Told her he cared about you too much.’
Tara paused to absorb the news. She felt winded, like a punch to the stomach. To find out, after all these years, there had been no betrayal was a shock. ‘Are you sure? You believe him?’
‘He’s my twin. I believe him. When he called me in Haiti and told me, I knew it was the truth.’
‘Why didn’t he tell you before? Why didn’t he tell me?’
Zac shrugged. ‘Said he’d hurt you too much and he’d been so mad with me for being surly and bailing out on him when Dad went to gaol that he’d withheld that part of the story from me.’
‘And Elsie?’
‘She agreed with him to stop. She said she was in love with me and cared too much about you. Fancy that! All this time we just thought they were selfish bastards.’ He looked at her with a twinkle in his eye, but Tara was lost in thought. A door in her universal world had reopened.
‘Elsie said that? Amos said that?’
‘Yup.’ He spread his palms on the table.
‘You don’t want to go find Elsie?’
‘Nope. That part is history. History splattered all over the papers and the net for the poor girl! I had to go to a third-world country to escape reading about her love life. Imagine what it must be like for her.’
‘Have you heard from her?’
He looked at Tara as if she was insane. ‘No, man. As if. I mean God. She’s a huge star. She’s probably dating Johnny Depp by now.’
‘She’s probably miserable. You should get in touch.’
‘Seriously? How would I get in touch? Facebook-stalk her management? No way!’
‘Yes way.’
Zac flicked his handsome brown eyes at Tara. ‘I got too much to do in life to be worrying about girlfriends, particularly old ones from years ago who are now famous and would have no interest in me. Plus I’ve got work to do. Me and the oldest born-again virgin in Culvert are teaming up again. It’s time to get our dreams cranking again.’
‘Awesome. You got room for one more old born-again virgin on your crew?’ She laughed.
‘Sure do! But for godsakes, Tara, you get back with my brother. This has gone on waaay too long.’
Tara’s cheeks flushed with self-consiousness just as Gwinnie and Elvis arrived back with platters and bowls of enough food to feed a small village.
Fifty-one
Out at the bowser, Miss Beechcroft got out of her Beetle wanting fuel, but also busting to tell someone the gossip.
‘I was at the IGA,’ she said breathlessly to Amos, who was kindly checking the oil under the curved bonnet while the pump thrummed. It was hard to focus on her monologue. He was still on a high from not only having Tara back, but also Zac. Still, Miss Beechcroft kept on.
‘I was standing at the checkout next to Chunky Nicholson’s fourth son, who was buying a Powerade at the time, not that he needed a Powerade, because no one has seen him run since he quit on his dad’s footy team in the under sixteens, and boy has he got big. I’m surprised the paramedics supply overalls that size. But anyway, his pager went off and he raced out to the ambulance, which is normally in Rington but just happened to be here as he was seeing how Chunky was getting on after Barb’s death. Anyway, the doors of the IGA got stuck open again. You know how they do. Which is not good given that the breeze meant the smell of the ponds was all over town. Anyway, the doors stuck so that everyone could hear the radio from the ambulance blaring out that Councillor-Mayor Jones had just died. Just like that. Just then.’ Miss Beechcroft barely drew breath as she blurted this all out to Amos, who now stood holding the pump as the fuel ticked over on the dial.
Kelvin Jones died? He absorbed the news, wondering how it would reach Elsie, who was somewhere in her rockstar princess tower on the other side of the world.
‘And,’ she continued, ‘all this was happening after the girls at the IGA were telling me some hot young redhead had moved into Mr Queen’s old house. A businesswoman from Sydney. What sort of business she’s hoping to do here is anyone’s guess.’
‘Everything else OK?’ Amos asked almost too cheerfully, given that he’d just been told of someone’s death.
‘Huh?’
He nodded towards the bonnet of the VW. ‘Rest of the car running right?’
Miss Beechcroft scowled, irritated. She had forgotten how socially inept those Smith twins were. They never gossiped. Amos had once said to her, ‘We pride ourselves on being a gossip-free service station. Loose lips sink ships, Miss Beechcroft.’ He’d said it after she’d tried to drag him into a conversation about a certain checkout girl who had a ‘thing’ for him and kept putting ten dollars’ worth of fuel in her car each time, hoping she would get Amos at the bowser, and all of town knew. Suddenly Miss Beechcroft realised the other brother, the one with the scar, had been the one tangled u
p with the now-deceased mayor’s daughter all those years back. And the mayor had been so vindictive after the explosion too. She’d picked the wrong person to tell. Miss Beechcroft reached for her purse and paid Amos for the fuel.
Amos grimaced as he took the money to the till. Culvert people sure were weird. Dead and alive, he thought. Councillor-Mayor Jones had been horrible to Amos’s family, but still he found a moment to send up a silent farewell to the man who must’ve struggled so much to like himself, and took that out on other people. Elsie would now have to face not only that her father was gone, but that Sarah Jones was on death’s door too. Could it mean Elsie coming home? A big star like her? After all this time? To Culvert?
Amos went out the back. He slumped down at the table with Tara and his reunited family.
‘Councillor-Mayor Jones fell off his perch,’ Amos said. ‘Just then. Miss Beechcroft said that she was at the IGA . . . Anyway, she said he’s died.’
Gwinnie set down the potato salad. ‘At the IGA?’
Amos shook his head. ‘No. At the council offices.’
‘Oh, that’s awful news.’
The Smith family looked at each other. Memories of the man came to them. The way he’d rolled in so many times to hound them.
‘Heart attack?’ Zac asked.
Amos pulled a ‘don’t know’ face.
‘More than likely,’ Elvis said, ‘given his physical, er, situation.’
‘Poor Sarah, and Simon and Elsie,’ Gwinnie said.
‘Do you reckon?’ Tara asked plainly. ‘I reckon he’s been driving them nuts for years, except for Elsie, who had the sense to stay as far away as possible. It might be a bit of relief for them. And besides, anyone who lets himself get that huge in life is clearly asking to leave the planet prematurely so he can float about weightlessly in the non-physical realm. Trust me, I know! I’ve been there! He’ll be much nicer now he’s just an energy.’
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