‘What else could we possibly want?’ Nina added with more than a hint of desperation. ‘There’s a microwave, oven, fridge, freezer, DVD. You just wind up this aerial . . .’ Nina again reached for a knob on the ceiling, turned it and then fiddled with the remote. The TV blared. She lunged for the off-switch.
Annie refolded her arms. ‘Like I said the other day, it’s about time. Two weeks away? Meredith will have to leave the shop, I’ll have to take holidays. It’s crazy! I’ve got so much on. We should just fly.’
Nina leaned one hip against a cupboard and clasped her hands in front of her. She wanted to snatch up the tartan tea towel on the counter and flick them both to their senses. ‘I understand all that,’ she said in her most patient tone, ‘but getting there is half the fun.’
‘Yeah, we could play “Spotto” and sing “Ten Green Bottles”,’ drawled Annie.
Her sarcasm didn’t faze Nina. She was used to these exchanges with her teenage son Jordan. She simply drove around the conversational speed hump. ‘Think of what we’d miss out on if we just flew.’
‘Mosquitoes, sandflies, spiders, snakes, ants . . .’ Annie counted off the bio-hazards of the Australian bush on her fingers.
‘That’s just silly,’ Nina finally snapped. ‘You’re from the country, you can handle all that. Besides, we’ll be travelling in five-star comfort all the way.’
‘I’d hardly call this five-star,’ Meredith sniffed and plonked herself on a synthetic doona cover festooned with bright orange and yellow hibiscus flowers. ‘The décor in here is just . . . appalling.’
Nina saw an opening and jumped at her chance. ‘Look, all this can go,’ she said, indicating the nasty matching citrus-hued cushions and floral bedsheets. ‘You can bring some of your gorgeous stuff in from the shop. Your linens, tableware, crockery. Have it any way you want—give the whole van a makeover.’ Nina saw Meredith’s eyes brighten at the magic word ‘makeover’.
Now, Nina calculated, was the time for the centrepiece of her argument . . . except that the smartphone stowed in Annie’s squashy leather handbag squalled again. Annie dumped the bag on the table and rummaged for the thing.
‘Annie Bailey speaking,’ she smoothly announced, stepping into the bathroom cubicle and closing the door after her.
This time it was Nina who quizzed Meredith with a ‘look’. Being with Annie and her dumb phone was like watching a mother let her toddler with Attention Deficit Disorder ruin story time at a playgroup. Meredith nodded in mute agreement.
Nina reached into a cupboard and produced a tablecloth—an Irish linen one she’d bought specially for the occasion—and spread it over the wood-veneer plywood table. She opened the fridge door with a theatrical flourish and presented a sumptuous antipasto platter—zucchini and mozzarella rolls, baked mushrooms with parmesan, potato fritters, roasted peppers with olives, capers and garlic, grilled clams and bacon on the half-shell. A bowl of her famous home-made parmesan cheese and chive biscuits followed.
Annie, her call concluded, stepped outside the cubicle and joined Meredith to lean over the table and coo with pleasure at the feast glistening with virgin olive oil. Nina was a fabulous cook—they’d forgotten that. The freezer gave up a bottle of good chilled Margaret River sauvignon blanc.
With Annie and Meredith both sitting at the table and swooning over the food and wine, Nina continued: ‘Just think, you’d have me cooking for you all the way! You could both do with some fattening up.’
Meredith and Annie sensibly ignored this comment. That was Nina’s mother, Wanda, talking. But it was true—the food was spectacular.
Now that they both had their mouths stuffed full, Nina made one final, heroic effort. ‘The thing is,’ she said softly, ‘I’ve been thinking about those times on the road with Sanctified Soul and, well . . . they were the best times! After all that, I met Brad, and had kids. It feels like I’ve been a wife and mother for almost half my life.’ Her bottom lip trembled ominously. ‘You don’t know what it’s like living with three teenage boys. It’s never quiet. I can’t hear myself think, and I’m not sure I’m actually thinking anything anymore. I need to get away, I really do.’ She sniffed back tears of last resort. Meredith and Annie set down their knives and forks. Maybe Nina was closer to the edge than they’d realised.
‘And I remember you, Meredith,’ Nina snuffled, ‘leaving Sigrid and Jarvis at home because you knew, even back then, it was important for women to spend some time on themselves.’
‘“Self-actualise”, they called it in those days,’ Meredith interrupted. ‘But I think really it was just about getting away from smelly nappies.’
Annie took up her wineglass. ‘But you could go away with Brad, or by yourself. What do you hope this whole . . . exercise . . . will achieve?’
‘I want to be with women friends.’ Nina was genuinely passionate on this point. ‘People who speak the same language as me. We’ve known each other all these years, but never spent real time together . . . not . . . you know . . .’ Nina gripped the edge of the table, trying to avoid sounding like a cut-rate Oprah.
‘If you say quality time, I’ll hit you.’ Annie was only half joking.
‘Maybe we’ll never have the chance again. Maybe in another ten years’ time, when we’re almost sixty . . .’
‘Hey, I’ll only be forty-nine then!’ Annie protested.
‘Yes, yes, Annie, we all know you’re the “baby” of the group.’ Meredith was doing her own sums and realised that in ten years’ time she would be almost sixty. How had that happened?
‘Anyway,’ Nina continued, ‘let’s go while we can. We’ve got the occasion—Siggie’s wedding—and we’ve got the van. Brad’s father says he’ll pick it up in Byron. He wants to keep going north to Fraser Island, so we can fly back.’
Nina took up her glass, her fingers gripping the stem tightly. If they didn’t agree to come right now, she’d have to throw in her tartan tea towel. She had nothing more to offer.
Annie kept her head down, silently tearing at a crust of bread. Meredith sighed loudly. Nina took a nervous sip of wine and watched them both intently. Silence and sighs. That had to be a sign that she was making some headway, surely.
Meredith was almost beaten. She set down her glass and raised one last feeble flag of protest. ‘What about that thing?’ She pointed accusingly at the wall. It was a gold-framed photograph of Gracelands, Memphis, Tennessee.
‘It’s gone!’ declared Nina. She scrambled over Meredith to pull down the offending item and shoved it in the locker under the bed.
‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, but . . .’ Meredith dropped her head into her hands and pressed her palms into her eyes, ‘OK. I’ll come. Let’s start packing.’ Nina whooped and jumped in triumph.
‘But when it all goes pear-shaped,’ Meredith added, ‘remember . . . I told you so.’
‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’ Nina clapped her hands. ‘This will be such fun, you’ll see. We should have a toast.’ She raised her glass. ‘To Byron or . . .’
Annie’s leather handbag vibrated with shrill alarm. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’ Annie’s hand plunged into the depths of her bag. ‘It’s just . . . impossible.’
Nina lowered her arm. ‘. . . bust,’ she sadly concluded the salutation.
The screen door on the van was wrenched open, banging hard on aluminium. Nina winced at the tinny clang and turned to see her son Anton in the doorway. He was shivering, despite the towel draped around his shoulders. Water was dripping on the black rubber doormat from every angle of his skinny frame.
‘Geez, Mum, what are you doing?’ he whined. ‘You’ve been in here for ages. I’m hungry.’
Five
Meredith regarded the pile of items she had gathered on the front counter next to the cash register and, once again, saw that her instinctive good taste had not failed her. There were three queen-size doona covers in plain white with a taupe grosgrain ribbon trim; two single covers, contrasting, in the same taupe with white tr
im; and six oversized continental pillows with cotton covers in a subtle fallow.
Meredith liked the name fallow. It was a colour a few shades darker than ecru—and ecru (from the French meaning ‘raw’ or ‘unbleached’) had been done to death. It was also lighter than bole (rhyming with ‘mole’), the shade Meredith had once championed in her interior decorating business.
She had been pleased to inform her clients that bole was one of the oldest colour names in the English language, dating from 1386. When children were presented with various shades of brown and were asked to paint the trunk of a tree, the shade they invariably chose was bole. Meredith liked knowing these sorts of details. Even if, secretly, she thought bole was the ugliest colour on earth.
All her life Meredith had been creative and artistic, and she could often divine what a person’s true emotions were through colour. For example, clients would come to her and say they wanted their room decorated in their favourite colour pistachio, but Meredith would just know that they needed to let go of the past and embrace something more nourishing, like moussaka.
Despite what some people thought, however, she wasn’t fixed in her opinions. She could always be swayed by intelligent and rational argument. Actually, for some years Meredith’s favourite grey had been slate. She had abandoned the shade late last year for granite—a shade of flinty determination—and felt the better for it.
Fallow was the hue she was entranced with now. She fingered the soft cotton of a pillowcase and rubbed it against her cheek. There was an honesty here—she could feel that. A rustic energy which demanded a genuine response. Meredith needed to know exactly what she was dealing with. She turned to her computer screen and consulted the dictionary.
‘Fal-low adj: 1. left unseeded for a period of time after ploughing in order to recover natural fertility; 2. currently inactive but with the possibility of activity or use in the future.’
Meredith was jolted by the description—it was exactly how she felt about her life. Not that Meredith could ever contemplate the idea of being inactive. But, looking past that negative connotation, she had to agree that, when her latest home renovations had finished, a cycle of intense and rewarding productivity had come to an end. And now, with Donald gone, she had to imagine how the rest of her life might unfold.
Many women would have felt depressed about all this, but not Meredith. A friend had once described her as ‘indefatigable’—as if she would keep on going when others might fold or fail—so she was looking forward to her regeneration. She would pop up through the soil reborn, in a youthful shade of pod or tendril.
Next came the crockery and cutlery, all chosen from a new range of summer holiday wares she had imported from Finland. None of it was plastic, which Meredith could not bear to see set on any table, no matter how casual. ‘Honestly, Paul Bocuse himself could serve la Mère Fillioux—Bresse chicken in a bladder—but if it was on a plastic plate, it might as well be a Big Mac,’ Meredith had said more than once.
The china she had picked out was white and chunky, embossed with leaves and berries. These same motifs of plentiful summer bounty were repeated on the cutlery handles and, in a triumph of coordination (which Meredith knew only she would truly appreciate, but then she was used to that), she had discovered a Danish glassware setting for four etched with stalks of wheat.
Meredith turned down the dimmer switch on the store lighting. What could she take with her that might be suitable for her daughter Sigrid’s wedding present? She reflected that this, at least, was one benefit of travelling by road. She could bubble-wrap the most delicate, elaborate lamp-base, vase or glassware and feel confident it would arrive in one piece. But would Sigrid appreciate such a gift?
The last time Meredith had been in Sigrid’s living space, two years ago, it had been on the top floor of a 1950s block of red-brick flats in Balaclava. Among the jumble of tatty second-hand items—which Sigrid proudly declared she had retrieved from a council skip—there had been some reasons for hope. A lovely vintage embroidered gypsy shawl draped on a corner table; a genuine bamboo bar—from the sixties, by the look of it—set with attractive ruby glass tumblers (although Meredith had counted five glasses and thought one should be disposed of so the set made an even four); and, in the bathroom, a stack of white waffle-weave hand towels. Meredith had paused to arrange them in a pleasing fanned display just next to the duck-egg-blue handbasin. Putting the best complexion on it, Meredith hoped that in the time since she had last seen Sigrid, her daughter had discovered her nascent sense of style and become a Woman of Good Taste. After all, it was in the genes.
Eighteen months? Could it be that long since she had seen her daughter? When Sigrid had announced she was leaving Melbourne to travel north, there had been a fight. Meredith’s offer of a junior managerial position in her store, with the possibility of a full partnership in Flair after a couple of years, hadn’t appealed to Sigrid. That had been a blow. The time since Meredith had last seen Sigrid had flown by. Mother and recalcitrant daughter exchanged the odd phone call, and Sigrid emailed excuses at Christmas. But even though she was pleased to hear from her only daughter, Meredith just could not stop herself from asking: had Sigrid found a decent job yet? Did she want to come home? Maybe go to university and study? For God’s sake, what was she planning to do? And now here they were with this ‘Charlie’ person wedged between them.
Meredith didn’t know if he was a banker or a butcher, a surfie or a used car salesman. The first time she’d heard of him was when the wedding invitation had arrived for a sunset beach ceremony on a Tuesday. She’s pregnant, was Meredith’s first thought. She had immediately rung and felt guilty relief when Sigrid had told her that, no, she wasn’t to be a grandmother just yet. But Sigrid had fobbed off her attempts at further interrogation with an airy: ‘Just come. You’ll see.’ Meredith had slammed the phone down and for the last three weeks had been plagued with curiosity and dread in equal measure. Should she go? Should she boycott the whole affair until Sigrid came to her senses? The thought that she had no-one she trusted to discuss this with, now that Donald had moved out, was also vaguely troubling.
Meredith found her reading glasses and peered at the invitation again. Printed on cheap paper and decorated with the ubiquitous yellow frangipani motifs, it didn’t hold much promise. Meredith had always imagined her only daughter would walk down the aisle at St Johns, Toorak, at 6 pm on a Friday, in an elegant slip of satin and lace. The invitation would be printed on a thick, gold-embossed card tucked in an envelope sealed with red wax and silk ribbons.
But that was all fantasy. The reality was that once Sigrid had married this ‘Charlie’ in Byron Bay, there would be no way back. And now she would be the one to shift the mountainous motorhome to visit Mohammed. How could it be almost a quarter of a century ago that she had first held her baby girl in her arms? And Jarvis, away in London this past year—how long since she’d sat him on her knee? Meredith bent her head and sniffed the cover of a continental pillow as if she could somehow conjure the milky custard aroma of a baby’s head. Ironing aid—that’s all she could smell.
As Meredith activated the alarms and locked Flair’s front doors, she also thought of her husband, Donald. Every time she imagined him, his image came to her in a flat brown frame. Not bole or fallow, just a sort of plain brown. It was frustrating that she could not name the exact shade. Russet? Bistre? Sepia? Umber?
Try as she might, she had never quite been able to identify the colour that framed him, but as she looked into the dark street outside the store window tonight it came to her at last. It was as bland as moth and as impenetrable as mud.
Annie made another call to Nina in the middle of the week. Nina knew it was a Wednesday because Anton and Marko had footy training and she had parked the Odyssey across from the oval to wait for them. She was supposed to be taking the dog for a walk, but instead Metro, the family mutt, was nosing his way through the bushes while Nina was plopped on a bench finishing her Marian Keyes novel and polishing off a p
acket of salted beer nuts. She checked the carbohydrate content on the back of the packet—3.5 per 100 grams. That was good. She was doing the high-protein, low-carb diet this week in preparation for getting into a bathing suit.
A couple of the school mums reckoned they’d lost three kilograms in five days! Nina had lost a kilo since Sunday. She was constipated and had bad breath, but it was a small price to pay. Only thing was, she was exhausted. She hadn’t slept well last night. In her dreams she was driving a baker’s van full of loaves and muffins. At 3 am she found herself standing in front of the bread bin in the kitchen, thinking of having just one half of a small dinner roll. She had put it back and walked purposefully upstairs. For the rest of the night—with Brad’s long legs intruding into her half of the bed—she dreamed she was tangled in spaghetti carbonara.
‘I’ve decided that I’ll come.’ It was a female voice.
‘Really?’ Nina held out her mobile phone and stared at it. As if she had picked up Jordy’s phone by mistake and his girlfriend Olivia was telling him she was coming over for an afternoon assignation in his bedroom.
‘Is that you, Annie? Are you saying you’ll come to Byron?’
‘Yep.’
‘Really, truly?’
‘That’s what I said,’ Annie replied evenly. It was disconcerting the way Nina swung between being a nagging mum and a wheedling little girl.
‘But what about work? You always seem so—’
‘Look, do you want me to come or not?’
‘Yes, yes I do. That’s brilliant, really brilliant!’ Nina jumped to her feet and beer nuts spilled onto the gravel path. ‘Oh, Annie, that’s great, it really is.’
‘But I’m telling you, if it all goes wrong . . .’
‘I know. It will be all my fault.’ As if, for the past fifteen years Nina had spent as a wife and mother, it had ever been anyone else’s.
Roadside Sisters Page 4