Roadside Sisters

by Roadside Sisters (epub)

  In fact, Nina reflected, she could have been sitting in a booth at the Mos Eisley Cantina in a pirate city on the planet of Tatooine (Star Wars IV: A New Hope). She had to smile to herself, thinking of how the boys would have fallen about, laughing to be in on her ‘spot-an-alien-life-form’ game. At this moment she missed her sons—missed their passionate kisses when they knew their brothers weren’t watching, their demands for one last cuddle after the lights were out, and their whispered declarations that she was ‘the best mumma in the world’.

  How had she landed at this particular breakfast bar at the end of the universe? Nina thought everyone must be looking at the chunky middle-aged woman in the oversized shirt and leggings, wondering why she was there. Except that no-one was paying her the slightest bit of attention—including the tattooed Maori waitress in the bikini top, shorts, cowboy boots and blue-black Mohawk—a refugee from the planet Aruza, if Nina wasn’t mistaken. Only she remembered that particular race of humanoids shared their memories via cybernetic implants, and Nina seemed to have been long forgotten.

  The remains of Nina’s ‘brekkie with the lot’ were slumped on the plate in front of her. She’d ordered refried beans, poached eggs, bacon, hash browns, mushrooms and crusty toast, thinking they might cure her hangover. Instead, she now had a bloated stomach to go with her mighty headache. Two cups of peppermint tea hadn’t helped. There was nothing for it but a reviving shot of vodka in a Bloody Mary.

  ‘There you go, dollface.’ The drink was dumped on the bench and the plates cleared with a clattering efficiency that made Nina wince. She found a couple of painkillers in her handbag, gulped at the spicy, alcoholic tomato juice, crunched the celery and imagined it was all doing her good. Only it wasn’t.

  She watched the surfers in the distance. In their wetsuits on the flanks of the rolling grey surf, they reminded her of buzzing flies on the hide of an elephant. Nina thought of the morning when she had ducked under the aquamarine waves at Mimosa Rocks. It was a moment of exquisite freedom on this trip that she would never forget. But, in truth, the journey had mostly been exhausting.

  For so long Nina had imagined being away from her ‘boys’ own’ life of football, electric guitars and computer games. She would commune with treasured women friends and come to a deeper understanding of the feminine. Women friends help us define who we are and who we want to be. But now, when she saw Meredith and Annie close up, she saw they had no idea of who she was. As for who she wanted to be, Nina wasn’t quite sure she knew herself, so how could they help?

  Nina rolled the cool tumbler of juice between her palms. She had to admit that all the behaviour she had indulged in over the past few days—the crying and doubting and questioning—had been ridiculous theatrics. She should have known Brad had an important reason for leaving town while she was away. That was the thing about her husband, she thought, as she fished for the ice in the bottom of the glass—he was a simple, loyal soul. Could the same be said of her?

  Nina sucked the chunk of ice, and then held it to her throbbing forehead. Had she said anything out of order last night? Nothing she could think of, specifically. And anyway, if she had, Corinne wouldn’t tell anyone. Would she? Nina’s stomach lurched and she could taste a vomity sourness in the back of her throat. She put up her hand to order one more for the road.

  Annie chose three promising wisps of silk and jersey, and headed for the changing room. She pulled the curtain closed and dumped the clothes on the wooden floor. She hadn’t seen herself in a full-length mirror for some days, making do instead with her unsatisfying waist-high reflection over sinks in caravan park shower blocks and the poky bathroom in the van.

  A quick inventory came up with: red curls exploding into a bedraggled mop, puffy eyelids, cracked lips, jeans with grass stains on the knee, an orange tie-dyed singlet and a pair of scuffed suede flatties. Brilliant! Here she was in one of the country’s most exclusive shopping strips—Queen Street, Woollahra—and she looked as if she was on her way home from the butcher’s after buying cat’s meat.

  As the van had droned up the highway towards Sydney, Annie daydreamed about where she’d go and what she’d buy on her shopping expedition. There were boutiques in Paddington and Double Bay she’d read about in magazines, and been looking forward to ransacking for years. Now, racks of gorgeous clothes, display cabinets full of beaded scarves and jewellery, shelves of handbags and rows of fabulous shoes lay before her—an uncharted land brimful of treasures—and she couldn’t find the energy to explore. It was all too hard. It was as improbable as Captain Cook traversing the globe to land in Botany Bay, and then deciding not to go ashore.

  Annie reached to unhook her bra and fancied she could smell the sour tang of last night’s alcohol seeping through her skin. Curse Meredith and Corinne and their pointless, stupid argument. What a bloody nightmare this trip was turning out to be. The term ‘emotional rollercoaster’ didn’t do it justice. It was more like enduring a turn on the Mad Mouse—a tortuous, vertiginous ride that made you long to get off and feel firm ground beneath your feet.

  Maybe they should just chuck it in. This trip was proving one thing: that all the crap Nina spouted about women’s special friendships was just that—complete and utter shit. The only thing holding them together for all these years had been the memory of the sisterhood of Sanctified Soul—but a less saintly bunch of women would have been hard to find.

  They were all fakes and liars back then. They had stood and sung about the ‘oppressed women of the world’—while Briony seethed that the purple of their gospel gowns was the last shade she would have chosen; while they all saw the needle tracks on Genevieve’s arms and told each other that it was her decision how she lived her life; while they all sang about the war in El Salvador, but Nina couldn’t even point to it on a map; while Meredith and Corinne battled each other for the spotlight; while poor, dumb Jaslyn moaned about her faithless boyfriend and she, Annie Bailey, nice little country girl, was screwing him on the grass behind the tour bus. How had they ever thought they were improving the lot of women through their unholy alliance?

  And two decades on, nothing had changed. Women still clawed and kicked each other for a prize no-one could identify or articulate. She had always thought that her female friendships were not much more than shallow gossip over an inconsequential cup of coffee. They were designed to look substantial and nourishing to other women but in reality were no more use than—what was it her father said?—‘tits on a bull’.

  Women friends were like that pair of comfortable rubber thongs you kept in your handbag for emergencies. As soon as there were no men around to admire your sexy stilettos, you could put them on and breathe a sigh of relief. But then you were inevitably reminded that you had ugly toes.

  Annie left the velvet curtained changing booth behind her and idly chose a pair of dangly earrings, a studded handbag and a chain belt. She paid up and bagged the lot.

  Looking out for a taxi on Queen Street, she watched two glossy women tripping by, arm in arm, with their heads together like a pair of prancing creamy ponies. Annie could not imagine wandering up this street with Nina and Meredith. They’d look like three old nags who had escaped from their horse float. Annie held up her arm and whistled; wearily picking up her shopping bags, she climbed into a back seat that had seen better days. Her arse dropped to the axle.

  There was no way to adequately prepare yourself for seeing the Opera House close up. Of course Meredith had seen it on television and once even from a car window, but she had never walked up the broad stairs fronting the promenade and stood underneath the massive, vaulted entrance. She read in her guidebook that more than a million tiles made up those graceful curves that looked to be billowing in the wind sweeping down Sydney Harbour. Although tens of millions of tourists had marvelled at this exact same fact, in exactly the same place where Meredith now stood, it was still—undeniably—a thrill.

  Meredith smoothed her tan trench coat as it flapped at her legs and paused to watch the proc
ession of a wedding party along the boardwalk. A long white tulle veil was being whisked away by the stiff breeze, and the tiny Japanese bride attached to it looked as if she might become airborne. Like a human seedpod. Her new husband gathered the fabric in his arms to stop her from flying off over Circular Quay and landing—sprouting—on the northern shore of the harbour.

  A wedding! And what fine hopes did they have for their union? She was driving almost two thousand k’s to witness the marriage of her daughter, but what was the point of it all? Meredith thought of Nina, fed up with the daily reality of domestic drudgery, and Annie, so tortured because she couldn’t step onto the very same treadmill. But Annie—and Meredith should remember to tell her this—had already made it almost as far as forty. If she could just hold on a few years more—and those years would go by in the blink of an eye—then she would be at the same age most women were when their children left home. Annie, lucky woman, wouldn’t be blamed for being a bad mother. And, even luckier, she wouldn’t have to think back on that time when she had held a baby to her breast. She wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the loss of the purest love one human could ever feel for another. Any way you saw it—from the point of view of a mother looking down at a baby, or the baby looking back at its mother—every joy was shadowed by its evil sister, sorrow. Kids left you, and took your heart with them.

  Meredith muttered, ‘Hah! Good luck!’, and then wondered what she meant by that. Her mother Edith had been a champion bridge player. Edith had always said that success didn’t so much depend on the cards you were dealt, but how you played them. If spades were the length of your leg, diamonds the brilliance of your intelligence, hearts the depth of your emotion and clubs the strength of your conviction, then Meredith had been given a good hand. But all her life she had felt Edith leaning over her shoulder and ‘tut-tutting’ as she had played her cards. Meredith had always thought her mother had nothing to teach her and yet, since her death, Meredith could not stop thinking about what she might have learned from the way her mother had lived her life.

  Perhaps it was as simple as being satisfied with your lot. Meredith had never found that particular peace, and had always wanted something . . . more. She recalled one of her mother’s favourite sayings: ‘Happiness, Merry, lies not in getting what one wants, but in wanting what one gets.’

  Meredith had always dismissed that timid notion. What had Edith got? Plain crockery, a tiny kitchen, a worn lounge suite and dreary carpets, and the boring man she’d married . . . her distant and taciturn father, Bernard the Dentist. How could that have been what Edith wanted?

  That’s why she’d bought her mother beautiful fine china. She wanted her to be surrounded by rare and precious things. Edith possessed the soul of an artist—something her husband and sons never appreciated, but Meredith did. It was revealed in the way she elegantly arranged flowers in a vase or in the lovely small watercolours of the garden that she painted and placed on the kitchen windowsill.

  That figurine of a mermaid? Meredith had wanted Edith to swim away from all she knew. But had Meredith missed the obvious? When Edith was fifty she had three children who lived close by, six grandchildren and a devoted husband. So, her mother was surrounded by rare and precious things. Things money couldn’t buy. Meredith, at almost the same age, had none of these. She had a house and a shop crammed with shiny, expensive stuff and had never felt more unloved in her life. She felt a wave of grief wash over her and found herself reaching for her mother’s hand. ‘I miss you, Edith,’ she whispered.

  Meredith had dreamed, for so many years, of what it would have been like to sing in the concert hall of the Sydney Opera House. Stepping into that soaring auditorium ribbed with ten thousand organ pipes this afternoon was like walking into the rarefied air in the heart of a seashell. Meredith curled up in the warm darkness of the back stalls, and then saw a young woman walk onto the curved stage way below. The woman stopped, threw her arms wide with the pure joy of being there and sang. Mimi’s aria from Act 1 of La Bohème, if Meredith wasn’t mistaken.

  Listening to her sing now, unaccompanied—a cappella—tears slid down Meredith’s face. Her mother’s words came to her from the kitchen in far-off Camberwell, ringing like a wooden spoon on the sides of a mixing bowl: ‘You can wish upon a star and make your dreams come true, but always remember that you have to choose your dream carefully. I’m sure you think that’s a dull way to go about life, Merry, but I chose the dream of a daughter. Here I am, and here you are. One of my dreams came true.’

  Annie and Nina had been surprised to find Meredith sitting on a wooden fence railing, waiting for them, in front of the RoadMaster in Centennial Park. They’d left a note that everyone would meet at 2 pm to hit the road again, but they’d expected that by now Meredith would have been waiting for a taxi at the airport back in Melbourne.

  They were speeding up the Pacific Highway, heading north for Seal Rocks—travelling a good hour, exchanging the odd comment on the slow traffic and various landmarks. No-one had brought up the events of the night before. In truth no-one knew where to begin with the post-mortem. Everyone always talked about freedom on the road. No-one ever mentioned that it was like being on jury duty: you had to stick it out in a small space together until you came up with a verdict on each other’s criminal acts.

  Then, in the rear-vision mirror, they saw that the clouds had burst over Sydney and the rain was bucketing down.

  ‘I’m sorry for last night,’ said Meredith. ‘I behaved appallingly and I apologise.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Annie. ‘I shouldn’t have dragged you both there in the first place. You were right about Corinne. She’s always been just out for herself.’

  ‘She has this way of making you feel as if you’re not quite good enough,’ said Nina. ‘Annie said she told us all to “piss off” in the end.’

  ‘Did she? The cow!’ exclaimed Meredith.

  And with that the black cloud in the van also burst and they joined in a hearty round of Slagging the Hostess.

  ‘Hope the skinny bitch gets washed down a drain into the harbour and gets eaten by a shark.’

  ‘Did you get a load of that picture of Her Highness over the fireplace? Fucking awful!’

  ‘Still, it was more animated than her face. How much Botox has she got in her head? And by the looks of things they transplanted the pufferfish lips as well.’

  ‘She’s shit on that Daylight show. And what’s with the cleavage? People are trying to eat their breakfast for God’s sake.’

  ‘That husband of hers must be loaded. Could you ever sleep with an old toad like that?’

  ‘Let me think . . . How much is he worth again?’

  ‘She’s doing cocaine.’

  ‘Noooooo . . .’

  ‘Trust me. Absolutely.’

  ‘We smashed her stone gargoyle. Brad will go mental over the ding in the van, but it was worth it!’ Nina was a little unsure of herself on this particular declaration.

  Then it was time for some serious talk.

  ‘You know, Meredith,’ Annie mused, ‘Corinne said her dress was ripped that night, but I didn’t see it. In fact, the first time she ever mentioned the dress was last night. And she never said the word “rape” either. She said Donald had tried to come on to her so I just assumed . . .’ Uh-oh! Annie had talked herself into a corner here. A fine mist clouded the windscreen. Nina began testing the windscreen wipers, as if she wasn’t really listening.

  ‘What did you assume?’ asked Meredith.

  Annie shifted her backside on her cushion, coughed and fidgeted. The thing was, back in those days Donnie Dalrymple kissed everyone, and his attentions were often accompanied by a sly bottom squeeze or a peer down the neckline. Genevieve, for one, had never been convinced he was a ‘reconstructed’ male. She’d bailed him up one night in a pub car park and told him a baseball bat to the balls might help him get in touch with his ‘feminine side’. They’d all had a good laugh about it later (when Meredith was out of hearing) and that had seemed to
be the end of it—until the accusation from Corinne that he’d tried to have sex with her. The group never sang together again after that.

  ‘Well . . . Donald . . .’ Annie squirmed again.

  ‘Yes . . . ?’ said Meredith, not taking her eyes from the road.

  ‘He did have . . . an “eye for the ladies”. I know he was supposed to be a SNAG and all that, but . . .’

  Meredith decided to put Annie out of her misery. ‘You’re talking about the bum pinching and the breast ogling?’

  ‘What?’ Nina swerved over a line of cat’s eyes into the gravel. ‘Yikes! Sorry.’

  ‘You knew about that?’ Annie was astonished.

  ‘Of course! Genevieve was right. That whole SNAG thing was wishful thinking. I always knew Donald was a bit of a perv, but that didn’t mean he was going to go through with anything. Any woman who thought that we could suddenly breed a race of men who were immune to a good pair of breasts was fooling herself. Besides, I was watching him, and he damn well knew it.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Nina muttered.

  ‘And I’ll tell you who else I had my eye on . . . Miss Corinne Jacobsen chatting up my husband every time she thought I wasn’t looking. Donald was in the film business in those days. She wasn’t above offering him oral sex for a part in a movie. He used to tell me about Corinne’s flirtations, and we’d both have a good laugh over it.’

  ‘My God! So what do you think happened that night in the car?’ Annie couldn’t believe she’d waited almost twenty years to hear this.

  ‘That she probably came on to him, he rejected her and, good little actress that she is, she faked being upset.’