‘OK now, turn slightly to the left. No, YOUR left! Yep. Now come straight forward!’ Brad was waving wildly, as if he was signalling to his centre-half forward that he was in a position to boot for goal.
‘Over a bit! OVER. OVER! You’re going too—’
CRUNCH! The sickening sound of torn metal and splintering wood came from the roof.
‘OH, NO! Fuck, Nina! The carport! The TV aerial!’
Nina saw Brad limp up the driveway, grimacing in pain and annoyance. She turned off the motor, threw open her door and jumped down onto the concrete. The TV aerial was bent, its head lolling like a snapped sunflower.
‘CHRIST! Didn’t I tell you to go through the checklist?’
‘Don’t shout at me! You’re making me nervous.’
‘I’m making YOU nervous? You’re not even out the front gate and you’ve already caused three hundred bucks worth of damage. God knows what you’ll manage in two weeks!’
‘Don’t talk to me like that! It’s just a mistake.’
‘It’s the six P’s, Nina. It’s what I tell the boys at training: “Perfect Practice Prevents Piss Poor Performance.” You should know better.’
Nina scrambled back into the cabin, slammed the door after her and shouted out the window: ‘Jam your six P’s up your arse, Brad! If I’ve broken the TV aerial, I’ll fix it. Like I’ve fixed everything else in the house for years!’
She wrenched the monster motorhome into drive and accelerated. She remembered to release the handbrake. Too late. She clipped the letterbox and hit the bluestone guttering at speed. In the passenger seat Meredith grabbed at the door handle to stop her head from banging into the window. In the back Annie’s champagne bottle was flung from the table into the stairwell, its contents gurgling down the steps, under the door and out onto the roadway.
Nina paused for a final word to her husband, standing red-faced by the front gate: ‘GO THE MIGHTY BOMBERS!’ she screamed, and shook her fist out the window.
The RoadMaster Royale roared up the street, the TV aerial beating time on the roof like a demented metronome. With an echoing, rebellious ‘Up yours!’ blast on the horn, Nina swerved around the corner into the next street and the King of the Road was gone from view.
The RoadMaster Royale was headed for Lakes Entrance on the south-east coast of Victoria, 319 kilometres from Melbourne. Meredith had estimated the drive would take four hours and they should arrive in time to see a glorious autumn sunset from the famous Ninety Mile Beach, although by now her schedule wasn’t worth the organic hand-made paper Meredith had written it on.
Their first stop was unscheduled, only 500 metres away, at the café around the corner where Nina pulled over to fix the infernal banging of the TV aerial. After she’d managed to wind it down and wrestle the mangled vent closed, it was takeaway cappuccinos all round over the table in the back of the van.
‘This is bizarre!’ said Annie, amazed, as she peeled the top off her hot coffee and peeked through the curtains she’d parted a tiny bit. ‘Here we are in our cosy little house on wheels, sitting up at the table. We’ve got beds and a bathroom, and there are people walking by down the street outside.’
Meredith leaned across the table and pulled the curtains firmly shut. ‘For goodness sake! We might see someone we know.’
Annie hooked one side of the curtains back and sneaked another look. ‘So what? This is hilarious. Hi!’ She knocked on the window, and waved to a startled pensioner leaving the butcher’s shop.
Meredith yanked the curtains closed again. ‘Don’t! They’ll think we’re a bunch of . . . what do they call them? “Grey Nomads”! Three retirees with dead husbands, who’ve all gone lesbian.’
‘You are mad, Meredith, honestly.’ Annie shook her head and slurped at her coffee. ‘And that reminds me, I bags the top bed over the cabin. Which, of course, you’re welcome to share, girls,’ she added with a grin.
‘That’s not funny, Annie! We’ve got three decent-sized beds—’
‘Two queens and a large single,’ Nina corrected. She spoke quietly, head down. She was fighting her way out of a purple haze of anger and regret. She and Brad had parted on such a discordant note. A ‘ding’ on her mobile phone signalled she had a message. There was probably an ad-break in the football. She was determined not to speak to him until tomorrow morning.
‘I thought we agreed,’ Annie reminded her. ‘Mobile phones off, unless it’s for an emergency.’ She was already feeling oddly disconnected from the world without the insistent ring of the ‘crackberry’. Like she’d dropped her dog off at the kennel. ‘If I can do it, so can everyone else.’
Nina and Meredith duly produced their phones. ‘One, two, three—off,’ directed Annie. A vow of silence was made. They were on their own now . . . with each other.
‘So, we should draw straws on the beds,’ commanded Meredith, ‘although I’d prefer the one down the back. If I had to get out of that top bed in the middle of the night, I’d fall down the ladder. I haven’t slept in a top bunk since Girl Guides camp. Nina?’ Nina was still brooding over her coffee.
‘Come on, darls, cheer up.’ Annie threw an arm around her shoulder. ‘He shouldn’t have shouted at you like that, but he was just being blokey old Brad. My dad still yells at me about my car.’
‘Bastard!’ Nina wailed. ‘He always makes me feel as if I’m some kind of bloody idiot. Like I’m in training, and if I don’t perform properly he’ll put me on the bench. I’m sick of it.’ She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Damn Brad! She should have been miles down the road by now, speeding past open paddocks, flying free as a bird. Instead she was still earth-bound and pecking through the table scraps of her marriage.
Meredith felt on safe ground here. She was good at this ‘tough love’ stuff and used it with all her interior-decoration clients when she could see that emotion was standing in the way of clear-headed judgment. ‘Well, in that case it’s a good thing we’re heading off. He’ll have a fortnight to think about what life’s like without you. And those boys of yours will have to smarten themselves up as well.’
Nina frowned at the mention of her sons. Meredith sensibly caught the warning and moved quickly to explain: ‘I mean, they will have the chance to prove themselves as young men. Think of this as boot camp for the Brown boys. In the best-case scenario, you’ll come home and they’ll appreciate just how much you do for them. You’ll have your own life back at last. I always insisted on carving out my own space with my family.’
Annie and Meredith sneaked a sideways glance at each other. Here was Meredith handing out advice as if she had all the answers, but she was alone in her massive house in Armadale. None of them had figured out how to ‘have it all’ and it wasn’t for lack of wanting, or trying. Having it all still meant women had to do it all. And until the world changed around them, it always would.
It was a confirmation of how special women’s friendships were—how very, very special—that this wasn’t mentioned and the coffees were consumed over a spirited round of the drawing of the short satay skewer.
In the end, Annie scored the top bed, Meredith the rear and Nina drew the short skewer for the smaller middle bed which could only be made up when the table was stowed. Nina had expected it. She was, after all, a leading exponent of the ‘burnt chop’ syndrome, that celebrated condition in which, after the lamb chops have been grilled for the family meal, the mother automatically takes the incinerated one for herself and leaves the perfectly cooked morsels for her deserving brood.
This gesture of the burnt chop could be interpreted in one of two ways. Either it was a demonstration of just how downtrodden a woman really was—and ‘Woman is the Nigger of the World’, as John Lennon so famously sang—or it showed that a woman was a self-sacrificing martyr who would always put the well-being of her children above her own paltry needs. Nina had always thought of herself as the latter, but did have to wonder how the Nobility of the Burnt Chop had come to be reduced to the Ignominy of the Crap Bed. Was she a doormat for
her family and her friends, she wondered?
Nina climbed into the driver’s seat and rechecked the Melways for the best route out of town. Her mobile beeped, signalling a message. Nina sneakily pressed the phone into service and scanned the screen. The text was from her mother. Barely half a kilometre down the road and Wanda’s apron strings were already trying to ping her back, like a floral bungee. She hit ‘delete’, switched the wretched thing off again and dumped it into the storage well in the van’s door.
Soon the 7.2-metre, 3.5-tonne RoadMaster was barrelling down the M1, with the afternoon sun behind it and the warm breeze off the highway funnelling into its four-cylinder 2.2-litre Mercedes engine. The Melbourne skyscrapers were shrinking to Lego-land in the rear-vision mirror but the drive out of town was taking longer than they had expected.
‘You know, my father used to say, “I remember when all around here used to be bush”,’ Meredith marvelled as the van took a rise on the road and another vast expanse of brand-new black-tiled roofs spread across the landscape like a melanoma. ‘I can’t believe it. It’s insane. We’ve been driving for almost an hour and we’re still in the damn suburbs.’
The irony of the charmingly named Woodland Park, Heritage Springs, Lakeside and Falling Water housing estates wasn’t lost on anyone. There were no woods to be seen here, and bugger-all water either. In the front yards of massive McMansions, reeking of drying paint and PVC glue, strips of newly laid turf were yellowing and curling at the edges like salad sandwiches left out in the sun. The grass, seedlings, shrubs and saplings planted in spring were now, after a blistering summer, merely burnt, crispy offerings, not much more than deep-fried garnish at the edges of concrete driveways. Even the hardest heart could see that out here hopes of a fresh start were withering on the vine.
‘Ridiculous place to buy a house.’ Meredith reached for her sunglasses. ‘“Little Boxes”. My father used to sing that song about ticky-tacky houses all sitting next to each other and looking absolutely identical. There’s not even a decent deli. What were they thinking?’ The van sped past a billboard featuring a handsome sun-kissed couple, 2.5 children and a dog. It bore the legend: ‘Rather than live someone else’s dream, we’ve built our own.’
‘A nightmare, more like,’ Meredith crowed. She pointed out the absurdity of the names of the countless streets, courts and avenues that flashed by—Boronia, Wattle, Blue-gum, Koala, Rosella. ‘Apparently you bulldoze the local flora and fauna, and then name a street after it.’ Another billboard—bearing the ironic headline ‘Natural lake . . . coming soon’—had both Meredith and Nina laughing out loud.
‘Well, people have got to live somewhere. And let’s face it, Meredith, your lovely leafy suburb once looked exactly like this.’ Annie spoke up over the steady hum of the engine. ‘Would you like all these mums and dads and their little kids moving into some hideous block of Housing Commission flats?’ Annie had come to sit on the step in between the two front seats, despite Meredith’s warning that there was no seatbelt and her perch was, in fact, illegal.
‘Maybe you’d rather they moved into the snazzy singleton designer apartment next to you?’ Meredith shot back.
Nina’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel as she tuned in to their bickering. They may have protested that they were ‘just having a bit of fun’, but she knew very well where that would end—in tears. And she wasn’t about to have any of that on this trip. She’d endured years of arguments between her twin boys and had developed a strategy to deal with it. She would create a diversion as cleverly as she had always done. Just like when the boys had been fighting over whose turn it was to have a go on the slippery dip and she had pointed and shouted: ‘Look up there! It’s a helicopter!’
‘My uncle used to have a market garden out here somewhere.’ Nina waved her hand vaguely to her left. ‘Probably about where that hardware barn is . . . or that homeware supastore. We used to come out here and help him pick vegetables when I was a kid.’ The distraction seemed to work, thankfully.
‘A miniature Ukrainian babushka!’ exclaimed Meredith.
‘I can see you on the back of a tractor, in a paisley headscarf and hessian dirndl skirt.’ Annie leaned forward and clapped her hands with delight at the image. ‘A baby blonde potato dumpling.’
Nina bit her bottom lip and gripped the steering wheel so hard her knuckles whitened. That’s how they saw her. As some rotund ethnic Mrs Pepperpot, carting a basket of cabbages. Well, she would show them. She’d lose at least six kilos on this trip. She’d walk every morning and every night. Cut out the starchy stuff and eat only chicken, fish and salads. The twenty kilos she’d gained since she’d married Brad was his fault. There was no way she could have stayed slim when he was playing footy and demanding pasta and potatoes before every match and training session. That’s when she’d stacked on the weight. The years of picking at chicken nuggets, chips, and macaroni and cheese from the kids’ plates had likewise gone straight to her hips.
Nina thought of Annie’s bags of slinky designer clothes stashed in the back. Nina’s holiday wardrobe consisted of a few wraparound skirts, baggy shorts, T-shirts and a couple of loose shirts. There was nothing in her size in the smart boutiques of Toorak Road. The last time she had gone shopping—for an evening outfit to wear to last year’s televised Brownlow Medal count—she’d barricaded herself in a changing booth with a scrap of beaded taffeta that barely reached around her thighs, and cried for half an hour. The only thing she had bought was a pair of shoes. At least her feet were still the same size as they’d been on her wedding day. She’d cried again when she locked herself in the bedroom and wouldn’t come out, despite Brad banging on the door and telling her: ‘You’re the mother of my kids. I don’t care what bloody size you are.’
Nina remembered watching the red carpet arrivals on TV that Black Friday night, the camera zooming in on the footballers’ wives and girlfriends in their spangled, low-cut, clingy satin frocks—and howling again. When the chirpy host interviewed Brad ‘Kingie’ Brown and he lied to a million viewers telling them Nina had been forced to stay home because the kids had measles—and then blown her a kiss—it was only a carton of Cadbury Favourites and a bottle of Yellowglen sparkling that saved her from taking to an artery with a blunt pair of kitchen scissors.
Nina wrenched herself away from the window on the memory. Everything was going to be different from now on. She was determined it would be. ‘I did have a headscarf, but it was blue gingham. And my dirndl skirt was embroidered red cotton, not hessian, thank you very much,’ she said with as much cheeriness as she could muster.
‘But was I right about the tractor?’
‘Ha! No prizes for that one, Annie. Every Ukrainian uncle had a tractor. She was green and her name was Vasylna, the Queen of Tractors!’
‘Well, there you go. My dad’s got a red Massey Ferguson he calls Eric!’ said Annie.
‘My mum had a Morris Minor she named—wait for it, ladies—“Morris”,’ Meredith added drily.
There was a welcome round of laughter and with it they realised that, at last, they had hit open country. With every kilometre travelled through the undulating dry paddocks, hearts grew lighter. This was an Australian landscape they knew well from when they were little girls looking out the window of the family car. At the horizon the heat haze dissolved land and sky in an airy confection of yellow and blue fairy floss. Through the middle the road was a flat black licorice strap.
Meredith wanted to shout: ‘Look everyone—cows. Real live cows!’ The first roadside stall they passed selling bunches of lavender and boxes of lemons, Nina had an urge to stop and buy the lot. Annie couldn’t take her eyes off the marshmallow clouds. It was as if she had looked up from the ground to see them for the very first time. They were flying now. Up and away and beyond everything, into the wild blue yonder.
Seven
When the RoadMaster crested the top of the hill on the Princes Highway overlooking the fishing port and holiday village of Lakes Entrance, the
April sun was setting. The windscreen framed a scene of old-fashioned beauty that might have been hung on a drawing room wall. The surface of Lake Victoria was a shimmering violet-blue looking glass. The rigging and cables of the fishing boats were strung necklaces, spun gold by the sun’s last rays. A ruffle of frothy white lace surged at the neck of the shipping channel; beyond that was the Tasman Sea, which gave way to the vast Southern Ocean, its phosphorescent fabric of aquamarine brilliance fading to dark navy at the horizon.
Nina and Meredith, sitting up front, were stunned by the view. They fancied they were at the end of the earth and, for the first time, the promise of their trip right up the eastern edge of the Great Southern Land unrolled before them like a silken ribbon. A long, slow intake of breath was all Nina could manage.
‘It is truly and utterly spectacular.’ Meredith found voice for the both of them. ‘Evening, When The Quiet East Flushes Faintly At The Sun’s Last Look—that’s the title of my favourite Tom Roberts’ painting.’
‘Fuck Tom Roberts!’ Annie muttered as she sat at the table in the rear cabin and poured another glass of wine. She’d forgotten just how tedious long drives through the country could be and had drawn the curtains on the view of endless dreary sunburnt paddocks and scrawny gum trees following the course of dry creek beds. It was hard to muster any affection for this landscape scoured by livestock, ravaged by feral animals and brutalised by the drought.
Annie was dying for a cigarette and desperate for the loo. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to use the tiny claustrophobic bathroom in the back and had been hanging on for the past half-hour. She thought of her disabled BlackBerry in her handbag. God knows what she was missing out on. Just one commission on a multimillion-dollar mansion would pay for a holiday to a five-star spa in Thailand and she could be up to her neck in floating frangipanis. Just hours from civilisation and Annie was already cursing herself for agreeing to come on this stupid, hairbrained . . .
Roadside Sisters Page 6