Roadside Sisters

by Roadside Sisters (epub)

  ‘Anyway,’ said Meredith as she banged her glass on the chopping board, ‘Annie’s charm offensive seems to be working. She’s probably downing vodka shots with the boys as we speak. Who cares? At least it’s quiet.’

  ‘She is drinking a lot.’ Nina was encouraged by Meredith’s disapproving tone. ‘But it’s such a big time in her life. You can see she’s struggling with the big four-oh coming up and the idea that maybe she won’t have kids. I can’t imagine what it must be like for her . . . especially after that whole thing with the first husband. It’s probably hard for her to trust any man ever again.’ Nina surrendered to the chocolate and took another piece.

  ‘I know it must be difficult, but she’s . . .’ Meredith snatched up a magazine and swiped at a rogue mosquito buzzing around her face. ‘She’s clever, she’s capable and so well organised. And look at her! Beautifully turned out. Wonderful figure! She should be able to find another man. If she could just be . . . a bit less . . .’ Meredith’s thoughts were now consumed with obliterating the tiny pest. She thumped against the glass of the microwave and was rewarded with a black and bloody smear. ‘HAH! Got him!’

  ‘A bit less . . . ?’ Nina was keen to hear what Meredith had to say about Annie’s predicament, because she had her own theories.

  ‘Well, that’s it for me. Time for “lights out”, Captain.’ Meredith turned to go to her bed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t help thinking I’m in a U-boat in the Atlantic in World War II—I’ll be down the back in my bunk, sah! Breakfast at 0700 hours!’ Meredith saluted and marched down the galley.

  Nina laughed at her performance. Meredith was a surprise package, no doubt about that. Every time she was pegged as a regulation eastern suburbs matron-in-waiting, the old ‘Mad Meredith’ surfaced, waving a rubber chook on a stick. Nina congratulated herself on having a friend like that. However, why Meredith persevered with a frowsy frump like herself remained an international mystery.

  After making up her mattress, a task which proved to be every bit as backbreaking as she had expected, Nina dragged on a threadbare cotton pyjama top and flopped into bed. She could only manage the opening page of her book—a particularly grisly description of an autopsy—before she started to yawn. She turned off the reading light and sang out to Meredith behind her drawn curtain: ‘Nighty-night! Sleep well!’

  ‘Goodnight!’ Meredith called back, and then added: ‘Oh, I can hear a frog. I can’t remember the last time I heard a frog. Isn’t that wonderful?’

  The light behind the teal curtain extinguished, Nina cuddled her pillow in the dark. She offered a silent prayer to God to keep her family safe, and then cursed to find an uncomfortable ridge in the cushions that fitted neatly into her fleshy lower back. She rolled heavily to one side and then wrenched at her pyjama top bunched up under her armpit. A button popped off—typical! They would write that on her headstone, she supposed: Here lies Nina Brown in a coffin two sizes too small. Typical!

  It was 2.15 am, Nina saw by her watch, when she was woken by the sound of Annie staggering through the door, falling up the steps, knocking over the ladder and swearing like a drunken sailor. Nina yelped as Annie stood on her hair, clambered over her and into the top bed.

  Moments later Nina heard a mosquito buzzing in her ear. She woke to swat at it in the gloom and turned to see the van door wide open. Turning on the light, Nina was appalled to discover that the white ceiling of the van was carpeted with black mozzies. Thousands of them had invaded the RoadMaster, intent on making a feast of it.

  ‘SHIT!’ Nina hauled herself from her bed, slammed the door shut, grabbed a tea towel and flicked it at the roof, sending the bloodthirsty beasts into a frenzy. Down the back, Meredith’s reading light snapped on.

  ‘Oh my God, millions of mosquitoes!’ she screeched. A couple of loud smacks against the wall signalled she’d joined the fray. The van rocked on its wheels, and it was soon obvious that a rolled-up copy of Gourmet Traveller and a damp tea towel were not up to the task. They needed chemical weapons.

  ‘Grab the spray, quick! It’s under the sink,’ Nina called. Meredith found the can, pulled her nightdress over her mouth and carpet-bombed the van with noxious fumes.

  ‘Go outside! Go outside!’ she shouted muffled instructions and waved frantically at Nina, who dragged the bedclothes with her down the stairs. Moments later they were both standing on the wet grass, wrapped in a doona and shivering under the stars.

  ‘What about Annie?’ Nina asked.

  ‘The hell with Annie. I hope she chokes.’

  A frog croaked. Meredith picked up a rock from the grass and pitched it into the bush. The love call of the lonely amphibian was silenced.

  The next morning Ninety Mile Beach was cloudlessly, endlessly, brilliantly blue—from the top of the frame of Annie’s vision, then down through sky and sea to the bottom of the picture, where her white feet, decorated with red toenails, were striding along beige sand. Way up ahead she could see Meredith, who was apparently power-walking to Byron up the coast; and some way behind Meredith was Nina, head down and arms pumping with exertion.

  They hadn’t woken Annie for breakfast and, judging by the silence which had greeted her hearty ‘Good morning’ and the careless slam of the door when they left for their walk, she was in trouble. And all of it over a few drinks! Well, that was probably an understatement. There had been more than a few drinks. She’d lost count after half a bottle of vodka, and that was on top of the champagne and wine she’d had before she made her heroic foray to investigate ‘Camp Yobbo’.

  And how wrong had she been about that? The camp of ‘ferals’ had turned out to be two youngish and personable blokes from the western suburbs of Melbourne, both officials from the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union—the LHMWU. Which was fitting, considering that they had been exceedingly hospitable with their liquor. The ‘miscellaneous’ had turned out to be a spirited conversation about ‘social justice’, ‘globalisation’ and, when they discovered Annie was a real estate agent, ‘working families’ and ‘housing affordability’.

  They were driving to Darwin—the Top End—on a boys’ own adventure and planned to catch at least one kind of every fish in the sea from Cape Schanck to Cooktown. One of them—was it Zoran or Matty?—had explained that playing the CD of eighties anthems was a time-honoured ritual to celebrate the life of the three-kilogram trevally they’d hooked from their tinnie. Annie remembered slow dancing to Australian Crawl, drinking, and, sometime in the early hours, kissing Matty. She also recalled that it was only the plastic pull-cord of a Mercury outboard motor digging into her shoulderblades that had made her stop and draw breath.

  How had they come to be exchanging passionate kisses in that dark corner of a campground in Lakes Entrance? It was always like that on summer holidays, thought Annie. Sand under bare feet, salt on skin and the pulse of the ocean quickened the senses. Hearts and minds were loosed from their usual moorings. The universe was to be found in a tidal pool—the rhythm of life in the rush of water over rocks; grace and acceptance in the wave of the tentacles of an anemone; fate in the claws of a crab.

  Annie kept up her brisk pace along the sand and saw the scattered debris of seaweed and the blanched bones of a fish stranded on the high tide mark. That’s how she’d found Matty. He’d been thrown up on the beach like a shell—worn smooth and clean by the sea—and she had bent to pick him up.

  But then, Annie had picked up many men over the years and taken them home. And like those shells collected on summer holidays when she was a child, during the drive back to the farm they mysteriously lost their pearly sheen. By the time she set her souvenirs on her bedside table they’d started to stink. The borders of her mother’s garden at the farm were still decorated with sunburnt shells brought home by Annie from summers at the sea.

  Thinking about the farm, Annie found herself wondering how her parents might judge Matty. Her mother would describe him as ‘a bit of alright’ and her father would
pronounce him ‘a decent stamp of a bloke’. A broad, burly sort of bloke who could haul haybales onto the tray of a truck from dawn till dusk, then charm the farmers’ wives down at the local pub with his old-fashioned good manners. But then that’s what they’d both said about her ex-husband, Cameron—and look how that had turned out.

  Annie couldn’t trust her instincts about men anymore. She remembered noticing last night in the firelight that when Matty laughed his features quickly fell back into calm and symmetrical order in his open, placid face, just a moment before she had composed herself. She felt him looking at her in this split-second—while her head was thrown back and her mouth open with the hilarity of it all—and caught him seeing something she wanted to keep secret.

  Annie wasn’t used to men trying to figure her out and didn’t know that she liked it much. Mostly men unloaded their problems on her, as if they thought that she, unmarried and childless, could have no real worries of her own. As if her life was an empty, featureless plain. Thinking on all this had made her reach for another drink.

  The exact sequence of last night’s events was, mercifully, still a blur, but she did remember the kisses. Teenage summer holiday kisses. The kind of hot and salty smooches that had meant the two of you were going together. You were now a sandy, sunburnt young couple destined to be one, never to be parted . . . right through to Anzac Day. Although the names and faces had long since faded of the boys she’d fumbled with behind the caravan park toilet block or in the sand dunes, the promise of those kisses lingered.

  When she’d finally made her way down the steps of the van this morning, it was as if the sandy-haired man in the red flannelette shirt, board shorts and rubber thongs had been an apparition. Matty, Zoran, the tinnie and the trevally had vanished. It was all too predictable. Just one more example of her crap timing.

  Annie turned to see that the path of her footprints in the still cool, pale sand had been inundated by the lacy patterns of the tide. Her tracks had disappeared. And she found herself thinking of that silvery trevally and its bright, translucent, intelligent eyeballs, and wondering what it would be like when she was hooked from life and hauled over the side of the ferryman’s boat. Would there be anything, anyone, any ritual to mark the fact that Annie Amanda Bailey had ever walked upon the earth?

  She bent to pick up a fragile pink-tinged shell and felt the blood thump in her skull. The world turned upside down and suddenly the sea was where the sky should be. Annie heaved and vomited her insides onto the beach. She wiped her mouth and watched as the surf accepted her sour offering without judgment, sweeping the shore clean once more.

  Nina was hot. Boiling hot. She’d tied her sweatshirt around her hips, pushed the dripping frames of her sunglasses up on her head, knotted the laces of her sports shoes and hung them around her sweaty neck and she was still hot. Her calves were screaming with indignation. Her elbows, every part of her was protesting.

  Nina turned to the ocean and could see spots in front of her eyes. Grey, worrying smears across her lenses that surely must be the harbingers of a heart attack. That’s all she needed—to drop dead here on Ninety Mile Beach! Brad would have to drive all the way from Melbourne to pick up her huge, blubbery carcass and drag it home. If she did collapse right here, conservationists might try to roll her back into the ocean. She’d be in the news then: Greenies Mistake East Malvern Housewife’s Body for Dugong.

  Up ahead Nina saw Meredith pull up at some imaginary line in the sand and turn to march back down the beach towards her. Look at her, still lithe and fit—one of those portraits you saw in magazines under the heading: Life Begins at Fifty: Four Women Tell. Well, Nina could tell them life at forty-five, with an extra twenty kilos on board, was bloody hard going. Especially in sand. Even more so when you’d had about three hours’ sleep and tried to wake yourself up with a huge bowl of muesli, a sliced banana and two cups of milky coffee. And then, stupidly, agreed to a walk along the beach. It was only 9 am but it was already hot and all was sand. Ninety miles of the stuff. Hateful, sinking sand.

  Nina had woken at seven this morning. She immediately found her mobile phone and tried to call home, except her battery was flat. So she had plugged in her recharger and stayed in her scungy hard bed until the morning light hit the floor and revealed the corpses of a fallen militia of mosquitoes. She lunged for the dustpan and brush to sweep the dead down the steps. The rhythmic strokes soon restored Nina’s peace of mind. There was nothing so calming, she thought, as watching the swipe of a damp cloth or the drag of stiff bristles restore order to a surface.

  By eight her phone was fully powered. She dialled home. No answer. She then tried to call Brad’s mobile. No response. Then she remembered that it was Sunday morning and, without her marshalling everyone downstairs for strawberry pancakes, bacon and maple syrup, they would probably sleep until midday . . . on Monday.

  Nina turned to see the deep imprints of a lumbering, constipated brontosaurus behind her. She plopped her backside onto the beach. She was stuffed. Didn’t have another step in her.

  O, that this too too solid flesh would melt

  Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

  It was the only quote from Shakespeare that Nina had ever memorised from her high school studies. She would bet that the Bard had never intended for those lines from the Hamlet soliloquy to be used by a fat middle-aged housewife to berate herself for eating too many hot chips.

  Lowering her sunglasses and looking out at the sea, Nina caught the shadow of a circling sea eagle against the bright rays of morning. She watched the bird’s sleek form hover and then plunge, talons outstretched, to snatch a fish from just below the surface. The metaphor wasn’t lost on Nina. She’d watched too much Dr Phil. Drawn too many cards from too many inspirational decks of wisdom. Stuck too many O magazine tear-out postcards on the fridge to miss the message. That’s what she had to do—leave her earthbound, sweaty, lumpy body, fly to the horizon, dive and trust her instincts. She had to believe that, just below the seemingly impenetrable surface, there was a glittering prize waiting for her. Or was that just a line she’d nicked from a Danielle Steele novel?

  In the meantime, The Journey Of A Thousand Steps had to start with the impossible trudge through the sand and over the bridge back to the van. She thought she might wait until Meredith passed her by. The last thing she needed this morning was a head girl urging her on with a lecture about the ‘intense satisfaction of digging deep and pushing on through one’s personal limits’. If Meredith tried that particular routine this morning, Nina might just have to drown her.

  Meredith slowed her pace at the spot where Nina was slumped in the dunes and gave her a hearty salute. Good on her for making it so far! It couldn’t be easy to start an exercise regime with a punishing walk in the sand after an interrupted sleep. Nina was a good-looking woman, and even a few stray kilos couldn’t disguise the fact.

  Meredith had long been a subscriber to the old adage that, after a certain age, a woman had to ‘choose between her face and her backside’. Nina was certainly carrying a bit of weight but her plump, round, unlined and pretty face was a testament to the saying. Meredith had no bum and the result was evident in the bathroom mirror—most mornings she saw that her face looked like the site of a landslip in Ecuador. She should tell Nina how attractive she was . . . and pass on the name of a decent beautician and hairdresser.

  And she should tell Nina how much she enjoyed her company. She was a busybody, that was true, but she was also so . . . comfortingly motherly. Not that Nina would welcome that description. She had some ‘self-esteem issues’, that too was obvious. Too much daytime TV. Every time you turned on one of those mind-numbing programs, it seemed there was a woman on trial for some maternal misdemeanour or other. The accused would sit with tears rolling down her cheeks in front of a studio audience while husbands, friends and children all charging her with a range of female failings. Too overbearing, too undemonstrative, too tidy, too slovenly, too generous, too miserly. Mothers were t
o blame for everything these days, it seemed. Motherguilt—someone had even coined a name for the low-lying cloud of dread every woman had hanging over her head. It was a damn sight easier twenty years ago, when it was all men’s fault.

  Meredith stopped, turned her face to the sun and tugged her white singlet over the top of her navy jogging tights. She shuffled her feet so that her new sports shoes were perfectly aligned—toes and heels together. She stood tall, breathed in to lengthen through the spine, then out to engage the muscles of her pelvic floor and flatten her abdominals. ‘Zip up and hollow,’ she said aloud with some satisfaction. Perhaps Nina might also benefit from Pilates. She would give her that phone number too. The morning sunlight refracted through the water and infused Meredith’s body with cleansing, invigorating energy. A walk along the beach was the perfect way to start the day. She hadn’t done it in ages.

  Last night’s mosquito invasion aside, Meredith was surprised to find she was enjoying her campervan experience. She had woken this morning and surveyed the few square metres of her new domain—the modest row of wood-veneer cupboards over her head, the plastic domed reading lights and the expanse of synthetic curtaining—and felt a curious lightening of her load. If she had been in her own bed in Armadale, she would have been mistress of some five hundred square metres of pure wool carpeting, a hectare of raw silk curtains, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Italian furniture and German appliances, French cut-glass light fixtures, hand-painted wallpaper, a hundred-year-old hedge . . . and an empty den. She had to admit that, as much as she adored her home, there was something oddly comforting about being away from it—eating fish and chips out of paper, and living in a cheap plywood-and-aluminium box. Perhaps it was as simple as having nothing to dust.

  ‘It’s just one more thing to dust’ was one of the favoured sayings of her mother, Edith. It was what she said when she was given a piece of Wedgwood or Belleek fine china for her birthday. It would be admired for the day, then sent straight to the ‘good front room’ and placed in the famous crystal cabinet. Meredith never saw any one of the precious items inside it used for any occasion in almost half a century. The family sat down in the kitchen every night and ate from plain white plates and ugly pyrex casserole dishes while a table setting fit for royalty remained behind glass. Even if the Queen of England herself had come to tea, Edith would not have surrendered the key to the crystal cabinet.