Roadside Sisters

by Roadside Sisters (epub)

  ‘Maybe you’ll have grandchildren one day.’ Annie kindly came to her rescue as she poked at the fire. ‘All girls. You can buy as many pink shoes as you want.’

  ‘I’m going to tell you a secret,’ Nina announced, ‘and then you both have to tell one too.’ Annie nodded her agreement. Anything that might cheer Nina up was worth a try. Meredith was also glad for the diversion. She was huddled in her chair, wrapped in her Rajasthani pink pashmina shawl, her face warmed by the blaze and remembering her Girl Guide days. She had been just about to suggest they sing a hearty round of ‘Ging Gang Gooley’.

  ‘I want my own café,’ Nina declared. ‘I want to cook. I’ve got the whole idea in my head. There’s an old bakery in Balaclava for rent. I could do big home-made breakfasts—Symyky fritters, grilled chicken and pork sosysky. Big stuffed rye and black bread sandwiches for lunches and precooked things people could take home for dinner. Real traditional Ukrainian dishes—potato pancakes with sour cream, boiled cabbage dumplings and meat dishes like kotlety, shpyndra, sicheniki. And for dessert I could do sweet little pampushky filled with poppy seeds and tossed in cinnamon. I’d have a long table down the middle, and smaller tables off to the side. I’d paint the whole room pink and call the place Nina’s.’

  There it was at last. Nina’s secret cherished plan had made itself known. There was silence and Nina had expected it. She was sure that Annie and Meredith, both successful business-women, couldn’t possibly think she had enough talent to make a go of it.

  ‘Prussian blue would be preferable.’ Meredith finally spoke. ‘Better for the digestion. You get pink and all that heavy food, and it would be too much.’

  ‘I know that place,’ Annie added. ‘It’s been up for rent for a while. I reckon I could help you get a good deal on it. But that doesn’t have to be a secret, Nina. It’s a plan. A good one too. You should do it.’ She reached over and clinked her glass with Nina’s.

  ‘I guess I’ve kept it secret from my mother and Brad. They can only see me at home with the boys. But they’d cope, wouldn’t they? I could be back home in time to make their dinner.’

  ‘They’d have to cope,’ said Meredith. ‘And it would do them good. Your future daughters-in-law will thank you every day of their married lives.’

  Nina was thrilled with their votes of confidence. She sat back and nursed her drink. Her hands were trembling. She was already behind the counter ladling steaming borscht into bowls.

  ‘Now it’s your turn, Meredith.’ Annie took up the wine bottle and filled her glass. It seemed to her that the flames of the camp fire flickered with an almost supernatural intensity.

  Meredith leaned back in her chair. She couldn’t remember ever seeing so many stars—an immense, broad canvas of glittering eternity, tonight as close as her own bedroom ceiling.

  ‘I painted Donald’s den that colour on purpose. I was sick of him being in there for hours talking on the phone, working at his stupid computer on his ridiculous ideas, leaving his toenail clippings on my pure wool carpet, taking up useable space. We’d run out of things to talk about after nearly thirty years and all I could see ahead was another thirty years of vacuuming around him, cleaning whiskers out of the sink, wiping his muddy boot prints off the parquet floors. To be perfectly frank, Donald had become just one more thing to dust.

  ‘I spent weeks looking at paint charts trying to decide what colour would annoy him the most and, when I found a lovely grey named after a duck—mallard grey—that was it! Donald in his mallard grey duck den! I don’t think he ever got the joke. I’ve turned the room into a place for gift-wrapping. I believe Martha Stewart has just such a room, and now, so do I. You can’t tell anyone I did it on purpose though. It’s a secret. But I’m glad I shared it with you.’

  Annie and Nina weren’t sure whether to laugh or cry. To think that the dynamic partnership of Donald and Meredith—their shared artistic passion and determination to change the world—had come down to whiskers and muddy boot prints? And that Meredith had chased him out of the house as if she was taking a broom to trespassing poultry?

  Annie disappeared from the circle of light and raided the haul of stolen scraps she’d stashed under the van for the fire. Her petty thievery from the nearby cabin woodpiles might be something she’d keep to herself. As she turned back to the fire with her arms full of offerings for the blaze she thought of what secret she might give up.

  Annie could have come up with more hair-raising tales of illicit and outrageous behaviour that would have shocked her companions, but that wouldn’t have been in the spirit of things. So perhaps, she thought, now was the time to trust her companions with her secret. Maybe this was the real reason she’d decided to come on this trip. To find a time to tell it and rid herself of the burden that seemed to be getting heavier with each passing year.

  When the fire was stoked once more, Annie began. ‘This is a strange secret, because I think I’ve kept it from myself more than I’ve kept it from anyone else.’ She paused to consider how she might best continue.

  ‘When I was eight, my six-year-old sister drowned in our dam.’ In her mind’s eye, Annie saw the flat oval muddy surface of the water blink in surprise.

  ‘I remember Dad running up to the house with Lizzie in his arms and her long black hair dripping. The drops of water made little round marks in the dust. I remember thinking that even a black tracker would never be able to find someone who’d drowned and been carried away, because I watched the drops sink into the brown earth and disappear. Water’s not like blood that stays there, and you can follow the trail.

  ‘The last time I saw Lizzie was in Dad’s arms—her hair was swinging and the sun was shining through the water. It was this beautiful rainbow spray. It’s weird because I can’t remember the funeral or anything else after that.

  ‘When I was a kid, I was always trying to follow trails of water ’cause I thought they might lead me to Lizzie. Even now, when I see water dripping on a floor or a path, I have to follow the drops. It’s silly, I know, but it’s this compulsion. I have to do it, just in case . . . As if I’d find Lizzie in a bucket, or at the end of a garden hose!

  ‘Every time I see a rainbow on a wet day I imagine that Lizzie might be at the end of it. I remember my mother crying endlessly for Lizzie—for years, really. And I think I made my mind up then that I never wanted a child of my own. I was scared to love someone that much and then lose them like that. I think I’ve only just realised it now. I know that sounds stupid, but driving away from everything has given me some sort of perspective on it all, I guess.

  ‘I’m sure that’s why I married Cameron. Deep down I knew he was gay, that he’d leave and we’d never have kids. And in some ways, I think I’ve chosen every man I’ve had a relationship with for the same reason. Every time I met a man who said he wanted kids, I ran away. And now I’m probably at the age where I might not get to have them . . .’

  Nina and Meredith sat forward in their chairs. They began to protest that she did have time to have children, she could adopt . . . Annie headed off their sympathies. She’d heard it all before.

  ‘No. Really. And I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I’m fine with it. I’m relieved to tell you the truth. I saw how my mother grieved after Lizzie left us, and I don’t ever want that for myself. So that’s my secret. And you’re the first people I’ve told it to.’

  Nina and Meredith could say nothing. As mothers, they had both lived with the daily dread of losing a child. They understood Annie had entrusted them with a precious secret. It was one secret Nina vowed she would always keep.

  Annie let her mind reel back to her childhood. After Lizzie died she had always tried to stay close to her mother. She knew, even then, that with her father away with the cows in the paddocks all day, it had been up to her to fill the old house with the noise of childhood. If she could laugh loudly enough, play happily enough, catch her mother’s attention—then perhaps Jean wouldn’t notice Lizzie was gone.

  Annie had sat at he
r mother’s feet listening to the soft whirr of the sewing machine. She would trawl through the pile of fabric scraps and tack together small triangles or squares of stripes and florals to make dresses for her dollies. Everything was dutifully held up for her mother’s inspection. Everything was extravagantly praised.

  ‘Just lovely! You are a clever girl. One day, Annie my darling, you’ll be able to sew for your own children. And you must have children. At least four. They’ll all play together and watch out for each other.’

  Annie thought of the small space by her mother’s feet under the sewing table. She could smell the rich, dark tang of sewing-machine oil, hear the clunk of pinking shears on wood as they chewed through fabric . . . and her mother crying. Blizzards of linen and cotton threads had floated through the air and Annie had imagined she was looking out the window of a fairytale through falling snow. The swish of a satin evening skirt or a silky petticoat would drape and billow from above, falling and blocking her view. The curtain at the end of a play.

  All over Treachery Beach Camp, through the branches of paperbark and ti-trees, Annie could see the twinkle of small camp fires. How many secrets were being shared tonight, she wondered. How many friendships were being forged in the heart of those flames?

  ‘Jesus on the main line, tell Him what you want,’ she sang softly.

  ‘Jesus on the main line, tell Him what you want,’ Nina joined the refrain.

  ‘Jesus on the main line, tell Him what you want,’ Meredith completed the trio.

  ‘You can call him up and tell him what you want.’

  They were on the road early next morning. Nina wasn’t saying much as she battened down the hatches for the day’s motoring. She’d made a call to her boys, but she wasn’t forthcoming on the conversation. She was quiet and that was unnerving. Meredith and Annie had become used to Nina’s running commentary on all things domestic: ‘The dustpan and brush go here. Hang that towel out to dry! Give that mat a shake!’ Her silence was unnatural. The drone of her nagging was as much a part of their daily routine now as the annoying buzz of a blowfly over their breakfast bowls. A Nina who had given up nagging had given up on life.

  The company was pushing on for Scotts Head, some two hundred and fifty kilometres north, for the night’s stay. During the next hour or so in the van, as they headed into the blanched light of another hot day on the coast, there was no conversation. The drab twinned towns of Forster–Tuncurry—joined at the hip by a massive concrete bridge—passed by without comment. More dumped rocks. More fast food franchises. More cheaply built apartments. Another beachside paradise lost to bad planning and ugly development. What was there to be said?

  By 10 am they were at the settlement of Taree, looking for coffee and diesel. Nina was standing at the counter of the BP service station when she caught sight of the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

  ‘HUNTIN’ CHEYENNE’ screamed the strap headline in red: ‘See Sports’. Nina snatched up the paper, turned it over and there, on the back page, was a grainy image that made her day. The young woman in almost-focus was Cheyenne Neck. No doubt about it—snapped in the dim light of a toilet cubicle, the flash from a mobile phone camera had caught the heart-shaped stud in her nostril. She was bent over the toilet lid. What was that substance she was putting up her nose through a straw?

  Meet Miss Cheyenne Neck, the woman who claims to be a credible witness to Kyle ‘Tabby’ Hutchinson’s drug excesses. This photograph of her was taken in a toilet cubicle in a Melbourne nightclub some hours after the Richmond Tigers’ recent heartbreak loss to the Sydney Swans at the MCG.

  Ms Neck has made a string of sensational claims against the embattled Tabby Hutchinson—including that the Richmond team management covered up the discovery of cocaine and ecstasy in his dressing room locker.

  Team manager Brad ‘Kingie’ Brown said last night the claims were ‘a complete fabrication’. The further accusation that the star midfielder had approached the club for an advance on his salary to fund breast implants for his model girlfriend was also ‘ridiculous’, he said. ‘Miss Neck is obviously troubled. She is at best misguided, at worst malicious,’ he added.

  Hutchinson’s girlfriend, Emma Pang, also came to his defence. ‘Cheyenne has been dating one of the Swans players since Christmas. She got dropped by one of the Tigers reserves players and I can only think she’s done this to get back at him and the club,’ said Ms Pang. ‘I’ve got no idea where she would get this stuff. It’s all just evil gossip,’ she added.

  Ms Pang also denied that she had undergone any surgical enhancement of her assets. ‘Check me out in the April issue of Zoo Weekly. Have a look for yourself!’ she challenged.

  Hutchinson has been charged with possession of a prohibited drug and will appear in the Melbourne City Magistrates Court next week. ‘The idea that his drug use was known about and condoned by this club is outrageous,’ Brown said. ‘Anyone who repeats this disgraceful lie will face swift legal action.’

  Nina could have cried with relief. Instead, she executed a neat soft-shoe shuffle around the metal display stand of chocolate and grabbed herself a celebratory handful of Cherry Ripe and Crunchie bars. As she was heading for the cash register, Nina’s mobile rang. She fumbled in her handbag.

  ‘Hello, Nina Brown speaking,’ she answered in her best professional tone, just as she had been trained to do.

  ‘Did you read it?’ Brad’s mood was ebullient.

  ‘Just now!’ Nina was elated to hear him so upbeat.

  ‘Not bad, eh? Now for Miss Corinne Jacobsen. We owe her one.’

  ‘Oh, Brad, don’t do anything that—’

  ‘All’s fair in love and war, babe! I love you, and this is war. As Six Evening News might say—stay tuned. You just enjoy your trip. The boys are fine. Gotta go.’

  This time, when Brad rang off, he’d given Nina the Kiss of Life. She paid for her provisions with shaking hands and skipped back to the RoadMaster. Meredith and Annie read the newsprint thrust under their noses.

  ‘So, this Cheyenne creature . . . was she telling the truth or not?’ demanded Meredith.

  ‘Who cares? Doesn’t matter,’ said Nina as she bit through the dark chocolate into a bounty of ripe sugary cherries.

  ‘But she’s like some sacrificial lamb. It’s not really fair . . .’ Annie complained.

  ‘Hello? It’s football,’ exclaimed Nina, ‘not tiddlywinks! There’re millions of dollars at stake here—and my sons’ education. You come between a footballer and a premiership and this is what happens. Shit is what happens. Maybe she’ll have learned her lesson and get herself a nice panel beater.’

  Nina joyfully revved the engine and roared off towards the Pacific Highway. She didn’t tell them about Brad’s oath to get Corinne. Who knew what he might come up with? The spectacle would not be for the faint-hearted.

  Just up the road they sped past the iconic Big Oyster. It was no longer a restaurant, sadly, and now loomed over a used-car yard. ‘Pick up a pearler of a deal!’ Annie read aloud from the painted sign.

  ‘It looks like a set of false teeth. So ugly!’ Meredith physically recoiled from the window.

  ‘The locals call it the Big Dentures,’ laughed Annie, reading from one of her brochures.

  Like every carload of tourists that ever drove past the massive concrete mollusc, they entertained themselves with a list of the Aussie Big Things they’d heard of: the Big Merino, the Big Avocado, the Big Potato, the Big Pineapple. The Big Dugong, Cod, Blue Heeler, Gumboot, Mosquito, Pelican, Earthworm.

  ‘Why do people do it? What’s the point?’ asked Meredith. ‘They should at least make them something most Australians can relate to around here—the Big Melanoma, the Big Cigarette Butt, the Big Police Speed Radar, the Big . . . Mac.’

  ‘There is no point . . . and that’s the point,’ Annie patiently explained. ‘You haven’t been on a holiday in Australia unless you’ve had your photograph taken in front of a Big Thing.’ They all vowed to pose in front of the Big Prawn at Ball
ina, just south of Byron Bay.

  ‘So, how long will it take us to get to Byron?’ asked Annie.

  ‘We’re right on schedule to land on Monday morning.’ Meredith checked her travel diary. ‘The wedding’s on Tuesday, on the beach at dusk.’

  ‘It’s an odd day for a wedding,’ said Nina.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ replied Meredith. ‘Just another part of the mystery, I suppose. But I’m so looking forward to seeing Jarvis.’

  The names Donald and Sigrid were notable by their absence.

  Thirteen

  It was mid-afternoon when the redoubtable RoadMaster pulled in to the Scotts Head Reserve Trust caravan park. This time Annie was nominated to front the site office. She jumped from the coolness of the air-conditioned cabin to the sandy path and was surprised to find the afternoon air so warm and oppressive. Thunderclouds were piling on the horizon—plump grey pillows arranged at the bedhead of bright blue sheets of sky.

  A weary young mother with a sleeping baby in her arms and a pink bunny rug flung over one shoulder was behind the counter. As Annie handed over her credit card, she could see directly into the lounge room beyond, to where a television blared with cartoons. Two small children in school uniform sucking on icy poles were splayed on piles of dried laundry. The floor was an obstacle course of plastic toys. Annie could smell onions and garlic frying.

  This unselfconscious view into the banality of family life fascinated Annie. Most of the houses she found herself in were empty or carefully tidied for public inspection. The casual scene in front of her was an aspect of humanity that was never on show in her modern apartment block in Port Melbourne. Were there any children in her entire street? She’d never noticed. Once more, Annie thought that she might have barricaded herself against the realities of life.

  When the van was parked—close to the gas barbecues and near a small red-brick toilet block—Meredith and Nina busied themselves setting up the table and chairs in the sun. Annie noticed that the people at adjoining campsites were entirely oblivious to the fact that they might be observed. Folks lounged in swimsuits, poring over crossword puzzles; they emptied buckets of soapy dishwashing water onto the grass, towelled naked children. Human flesh was on display in all its lumpy, bumpy, hairy, hang-down glory. Annie was reminded that she had spent many summer holidays in just such a setting and, thinking back on it, she could only imagine that her parents made the drive from Tongala to the seaside every year for her benefit. How many times had they made sacrifices—driven long distances, spent time with families they didn’t much like and saved their money to send her to boarding school—so that she might not miss her little sister?