Roadside Sisters

by Roadside Sisters (epub)

  Striding along, right at the point where sand met sea, and relishing the painful strain in her thigh muscles, Meredith’s pace did not slacken. She could see Annie up ahead and was determined to run straight past her. It would do Annie good to understand that her selfish act had cost both her and Nina a decent night’s sleep. She didn’t want to even think about what had transpired in the early hours at the campsite at the end of the caravan park.

  Meredith was startled by a splash in front of her and saw that Annie had torn off her clothes and was diving, naked, through the aquamarine shallows and out through the breakers. She caught a flash of smooth white glistening thigh and was reminded of the Royal Doulton figurine of a mermaid she had once bought for her mother.

  When Edith died last year and it had been left to her to pack up the contents of the old house in Camberwell, Meredith had dropped her father, Bernard, off at the nursing home and then returned to the house to find the key to the crystal cabinet. She had chosen a hammer from the neat shadow board in the garage, carefully laid newspaper on the Axminster carpet and then smashed every teacup, teapot, serving platter and gravy boat. The mermaid was saved until last. One blow had taken its head clean off.

  Why had she even bought her mother that mermaid? she wondered. With her tight springy perm, permanently pressed slacks and neat blouse, there was no-one more unlike a mermaid than Edith. Now that she thought about it, she had never seen her mother wet. Not even from the bath, or the rain. Meredith was horrified to realise she was humming one of Edith’s favourite songs, Rod Stewart’s ‘We Are Sailing’. She pounded all the way back to the caravan park in silence.

  Eight

  ‘Do you remember when we played here at the arts festival?’ Nina asked as the van trundled towards Mallacoota. The day was still, and unseasonably warm. Nina was loving the drive through the Croajingolong National Park to the sleepy coastal town. She was deep in the Australian bush now. They’d all been silent for a good hour, savouring the tangy smell of the eucalypt forest.

  ‘I know it was in the mid-eighties, but I can’t remember a lot more than that,’ said Annie who, after a sheepish apology, had finally been readmitted to her perch between the front seats. In fact, a good many of Annie’s memories of that decade had sunk beneath a tide of drugs and alcohol. The places she had been and people she had met now swam up to her like apparitions from the Lost City of Atlantis.

  ‘I first came to the Mallacoota Festival with Briony when we were doing comedy,’ said Meredith, who had wound down her window to feel the breeze on her face. Both Nina and Annie hooted with derision. The Epidurals! They’d forgotten about that time in Meredith’s life when she had styled herself as one half of a comedy duo. Meredith had almost forgotten too. Had that insane woman with the hairy legs and armpits and spiky hair really been her?

  The Epidurals had first met at their weekly mothers’ group at a ‘wimmin’s space’ on the first floor of the Fitzroy Food Co-op. Meredith’s children were preschoolers then—Sigrid three, and Jarvis a baby. Briony had eighteen-month-old Artemis. The two had bonded over mashing lentils, pausing only to salute each other with organic carrot and parsnip juice. They were sure the vegetables were straight from the farm because the juice tasted slightly of dirt. Clean, pesticide-free dirt, they smugly reminded each other.

  Briony always carried a small vial of Dr Bach Rescue Remedy in her wicker basket and would administer four drops of Cherry Plum Flower Essence on Meredith’s tongue in the case of emergency, to ‘restore emotional balance’. In the beginning Briony hadn’t been sure that lentil vomit on an alpaca wool poncho actually qualified as an ‘emotional emergency’ but when Meredith began to hyperventilate, Briony thought she could make an exception in this one instance. After that, Meredith called for the Rescue Remedy even as she hauled her stroller up the wooden stairs to the ‘wimmin’s space’, and Briony was happy enough to administer the dose. After all, it was about wimmin taking responsibility for their personal emotional, physical and spiritual well-being.

  In the early eighties Meredith’s husband, Donald, had been starting out as a filmmaker. He’d scored some work on The Man From Snowy River. In the dim kitchen at the rear of the tiny terrace in North Fitzroy Meredith had measured the seconds and minutes until he came home by the individual grains of couscous, barley and oats she ran through her fingers. She had spent hours boiling, steaming and rendering them into something the children would stomach. When the kids discovered cornflakes at her mother’s place she reasoned that corn was a grain after all, and was quietly thankful she’d found something they’d swallow. She didn’t feel the need to mention this to Briony. One of Briony’s favourite cautionary tales was about the scientific experiment with rats that fared better by eating the cornflakes box rather than its actual contents.

  When, finally, Donald returned, with Snowy in the can and before pre-production started in earnest on Crocodile Dundee, he honoured his part of their bargain. During Epidurals rehearsals, he’d bring the kids along, asleep in the double stroller. He even laughed at the dick jokes. Meredith had loved him then. They were a team. She was a liberated woman and he was a Sensitive New Age Guy. Briony suspected that declaring themselves SNAGs was just another ruse men used to get wimmin into bed. Donald protested he’d never had the least desire to get wimmin into bed in his entire life. Meredith’s comedy career had taken her on a round of dingy Melbourne pubs and clubs and once to the Adelaide Festival. She and Briony were routinely abused as ‘a couple of hairy dykes’ by the drunken hecklers from bucks’ night parties. Standing at the bar after the show with their arms around each other’s waists was a good way to fend off boorish pick-up lines.

  They had abandoned the Epidurals after one particularly nasty review in The Age: ‘The Epidurals is an apt name for this pair of die-hard feminists, because that’s what every man and quite a few of the women in the audience were calling for after an hour of unfunny tampon, leg-waxing and armpit-shaving jokes. After a night crossing and uncrossing my legs during the put-downs of male genitalia, I knew an epidural wouldn’t do the trick. The only way I would see this act again is under general anaesthetic. Utter rubbish!’

  Meredith never forgot that public mauling and years later, when she heard this same critic on ABC radio hosting the afternoon show, she had logged on to the website guestbook and written anonymously that he was ‘Utter rubbish!’. This had given her a great deal of satisfaction.

  ‘So, do you ever hear from Briony?’ Nina asked Meredith as the van purred along beneath a canopy of branches.

  ‘She sent a nice card when Edith died. She’s up in Cairns, running some mad tree-house eco village tourism thing in the Daintree apparently.’

  ‘Well that apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree.’

  ‘Meaning . . . ?’ Meredith leaned forward to catch Nina’s eye as she drove. Meredith knew exactly what she meant: that owning a swish interior decorating and homewares store was a long way from parsnip juice at a wimmin’s co-op.

  Nina blithely continued: ‘Don’t you ever look back and wonder what went—’

  ‘What went right? Thank God Donald did so well in movies financially in those early days and was able to drag us out of that hovel in Fitzroy. Look at most of that old arts crowd now. You still see them hanging around the cafés, looking a million years old. Still renting. Poor as church mice, most of them. Thank God I left all that behind and made a success of myself for my family’s sake. That entire era was an utter aberration, as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘You don’t mean Sanctified Soul as well?’ Nina was crushed. Being on the road and singing with the group was one of the best times of her life.

  ‘A bunch of silly feminists singing black American, gypsy and protest songs? A cappella? It means “unaccompanied . . . without music”. Stupid. Waste of time.’

  ‘Oh, that’s crap, Meredith!’ said Annie. ‘We had a great time. And out of all of us you were the one who was the most passionate about changing the world. Remember how
you used to get stuck into me and Nina for wearing high heels?’

  ‘She was right,’ said Nina. ‘I’ve got bunions now. They hurt like hell if I wear stilettos.’

  ‘You and Briony would come to rehearsals covered in paint,’ Annie continued. ‘And you both used to brag about defacing almost every advertising billboard in the entire northern suburbs in the early eighties.’

  ‘I used to watch out for those billboards,’ Nina recalled. ‘I remember going to work on the tram down Nicholson Street and getting this thrill every time I saw some half-naked woman in a lingerie ad covered in slogans. It made me think things were changing.’

  ‘“Smash Sexism”, “Adam and Even!” and “Use the ‘F’ word—Feminist”. Wasn’t that the sort of stuff you used to spray?’ Annie asked with some amusement.

  Meredith turned her face to the window. ‘Actually Briony was the billboard specialist. I wasn’t good with heights. I was better at the back of toilet doors. “Men put us on pedestals and then look up our dresses”, that was one of my favourites. And “Feminism Spoken Here”. I liked that one too. I used to carry a black texta in my bag.’ She paused. ‘I’ve got beeswax lip balm now.’

  Annie laughed at the irony of it. ‘Hah! Like to see you try to deface an ad for Australia’s Next Top Model with lip balm.’

  ‘Well, there you have it. In the end we didn’t achieve anything really. Look at women in the media today—porn stars and princesses—that sums it up, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But at least girls today get to choose what they want to be,’ Annie pressed on. ‘That must have been the point. That must make it all worthwhile when you look back.’

  ‘And what’s Sigrid chosen? To get married at twenty-four!’ Meredith huffed and planted her bare feet on the dashboard.

  ‘You had Sigrid at twenty-five,’ Nina reminded her.

  ‘And that’s what I’m saying—nothing’s changed. I’ve told her she can do anything with her life, be anything she wants.’

  ‘Maybe you should have been more specific,’ Annie quipped.

  Meredith’s toes scrunched with annoyance. ‘That’s just a stupid punchline, Annie. You know what I’m saying.’

  ‘Well, maybe she’s rebelling,’ Annie offered. ‘The way you did with Edith.’

  At the mention of her mother’s name, Meredith turned her face back to the wall of trees flashing by her window. ‘What’s Sigrid got to rebel about? It’s just damned stupid. She’s doing it to punish me, that’s all.’

  ‘But that’s what rebelling is,’ said Nina.

  The home truths were coming too thick and fast for Meredith’s liking. She wanted the conversation to come to a dead stop. ‘Neither of you has daughters. You just don’t understand.’

  Before Nina could open her mouth to protest, a road sign announcing they had arrived in Mallacoota came into view and Annie’s memory was kick-started: ‘I do remember! We all stayed in tents in Jaslyn’s boyfriend’s backyard. Ooh, he was gorgeous! A woodworker. Dirty nails. Smelled of linseed oil. We had quite a torrid secret affair during that festival.’

  ‘What!?’ Meredith and Nina were both appalled at the casual confession.

  ‘You were screwing Jaslyn’s boyfriend?’ Nina turned from the road to look Annie in the eye. ‘But we all had a pact about that, didn’t we? Wasn’t it strictly “hands off” each other’s men?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Meredith backed Nina. ‘It was supposed to be a sisterhood that expressed women’s solidarity, and part of that was being honest with each other, not letting men come between us. We were supposed to be beyond the “male gaze”.’

  Annie sputtered into her water bottle at the mention of the ‘male gaze’. She hadn’t heard that term in years and didn’t know what it was supposed to mean . . . then or now. Something to do with being seen as a sex object, she supposed. Well that war, at least, was won. Didn’t women these days have the right to view men in exactly the same way?

  ‘Hey!’ She shrugged off their disapproval and wrapped her arms around her knees. ‘Like Meredith just said, it was a lifetime ago. Maybe it was an aberration. You don’t think we still believe in all that “women need men like fish need bicycles” stuff, do you?’ There was a long pause as everyone digested what Annie had just said.

  ‘No we don’t. But we bloody well should!’ roared Meredith.

  ‘Amen to that!’ Nina pounded the steering wheel with delight, and to a rousing nostalgic rendition of ‘Sisters Are Doin’ it for Themselves’, the mighty RoadMaster Royale rolled into town.

  A $110 tank of petrol, a bucket of potato wedges, a packet of cigarettes and a bag of frozen bait later, and the RoadMaster was heading purposefully back out of town towards Genoa on the very same road.

  They’d made a brief tour of Mallacoota and pointed out the landmarks they remembered. The town had been remarkably untouched by the past two decades. But they’d rejected the camping ground. Too crowded. Meredith wasn’t keen for a repeat of last night and, besides, Nina had in her mind a virtual postcard of the place where she wanted to spend the evening: an isolated, shady flat clearing in the bush with a picnic table, a water view, kookaburras, wallabies . . . and no rock music or mosquitoes. Nothing less would satisfy her.

  She turned off the highway and skilfully negotiated the van down various potholed dirt fire-trails leading to the South Arm of the Top Lake. Meredith peered ahead anxiously for low-hanging branches which would surely tear off the roof. Every scrape of gum leaves on aluminium made her jaw ratchet and tighten. The huge, unwieldy vehicle rocked alarmingly from side to side. In the back, Annie cursed and dived like an Arsenal goalie as books, sunglasses, mobile phones, bottles of suntan cream—and anything else that wasn’t nailed down—slid off counters and crashed to the floor.

  After a good twenty minutes of tortuous driving—during which Meredith and Annie both begged her to ‘Stop! Here’s fine!’—Nina turned the last corner and there it was: a deserted, picture-perfect spot on the lake’s shore. Nina jumped from her seat and her expert survey revealed a wooden camp table, fireplace and a tidy pile of chopped wood. Even a well-maintained drop dunny. It was just as she had imagined. She gave the girls the ‘thumbs-up’ of approval and they climbed from the van with relief. They were treated to a raucous welcome by a tribe of kookaburras.

  ‘Look, look! Wallabies!’ Annie pointed to a thicket of scrub where they were being regarded in turn by inquisitive large brown eyes. She stepped forward and three grey furry heads ducked for cover, thumping through the crackling undergrowth to a safe distance.

  ‘This is a wonderful spot. Gorgeous!’ called Meredith from the sliver of pebbly beach just beyond a fringe of she-oak. Before her a still expanse of water reflected the afternoon sky and the hills of thick grey-blue bush off in the distance. There was not a sign of human habitation anywhere except, she smiled, for the giant, three-bed apartment-on-wheels that Nina was now reversing into a level parking place.

  ‘Right! I’m going fishing. Who’s coming?’ Annie clapped her hands purposefully and started to load her basket with supplies. Cold chardonnay and a copy of the English edition of Harper’s Bazaar went in first. She pulled on a pair of shorts and a singlet and slipped her feet into blue rubber thongs.

  ‘Go for it, Annie! I didn’t know you were a fisherwoman.’ Nina opened the outside locker of the van and rummaged for her father-in-law’s fishing rod.

  ‘My dad used to take me out on the Goulburn River when I was a kid,’ said Annie. ‘It wasn’t far from the farm at Tongala. You could still catch redfin, yellow-belly, all the native fish. But it’s mostly just European carp now. Bastards of things!’

  She kicked at the grass and jammed her fists into her jeans pockets. She was overdue for a visit to the farm, but knew what that would mean—more nagging from her mother about why she hadn’t found a new husband, hadn’t had kids. Still, Annie would have to face another round of it soon. Brian hadn’t been well with his ‘nerves’, Jean had whispered down the phone the last time they spoke
.

  ‘The Worst Drought in 100 Years’ was the headline in the Kyabram Free Press but it wasn’t just the parched soil Annie had seen on her last visit home. It was as if her parents’ youth and vitality were also evaporating before her eyes. They were in their mid-sixties, but seemed a decade older. Jean had refused to accept the envelope of cash Annie tried to press upon her, but she had been relieved to see that the $200 a week she later transferred electronically into the farm account hadn’t been returned—although the simple reason for that might have been that Jean had no idea how to send it back.

  Meredith slathered herself with sunblock, perched an improbable straw hat trimmed with cherries on her head, and traipsed off to join Annie by the water to chance her luck with the rod.

  Nina turned the van’s power supply to ‘battery’ and then spent some time sweeping the floor, straightening beds and restowing all the items that had come loose on the drive down the bush trail. Now what? She turned her attention to the campsite, fossicked for kindling and built a fire in the fireplace ready to be lit. She arranged the camp chairs, threw a tablecloth over the rough wooden picnic table and . . . now bloody what?

  Nina realised that she had no idea what to do with herself. She should be settling back in a chair with her book and a glass of wine, enjoying the afternoon sun in this idyllic spot, but instead she found herself itching for some menial task to perform. She’d be stacking gum leaves into neat piles next.