Three Gold Coins

by Josephine Moon

  Sunny covered her face with her hands, trying to will sleep to come. The rough edges of paint on her fingers brushed against her nose.

  The handle of Eliza’s door scritched and the hinges creaked. Soft footsteps padded along the passage. Her mother obviously couldn’t sleep either.

  Sunny flung off the bedcover—a light blanket, all that was needed in September in Brisbane—and followed Eliza to the kitchen, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the light. Her mother was reaching up on tiptoe, into the top cupboard where the tea and coffee were kept, along with the Milo which had to be stored out of reach to stop Hudson eating it with a spoon.

  Eliza jumped as Sunny approached, and clutched the tea canister to her chest.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep?’ Sunny asked, grateful to have someone else awake in the middle of the night. It made her own anxiety about him easier to bear.

  Eliza squinted, lacking her glasses. ‘I was worrying about Lara, alone on the other side of the world.’

  Sunny’s shoulders slumped. ‘Me too, among other things. That, and Hudson’s snoring.’

  ‘It’s rattling the walls,’ Eliza said, moving to the kettle and flicking the switch. She held up the tea canister, questioning.

  ‘No, thanks.’ Sunny leaned against the bench, catching sight of the red paint stains across her navy cotton pants. She didn’t care much for clothes and had never been one for pyjamas, happy to simply fall into bed in whatever she was wearing. She’d slept quite soundly on many couches in many people’s homes wearing her jeans. Sleep had never been an issue for her. Until the past week, anyway.

  Sunny did love the winter pyjama sets on her children, though. Somehow, her estimation of her mothering efforts inched up a notch when she got the end part of the day down pat—dinner, bath, pyjamas, teeth, stories, bed. Regardless of the chaos two active five-year-olds could create throughout the day, the world was restored to some sort of order in the blissful, relieving silence that fell once they slipped into dreamland.

  And then Hudson started to snore.

  She studied Eliza’s hair as her mother moved about the kitchen. It was flattened on one side and Sunny wondered if she could suggest a newer, trendier haircut—something shorter, a close crop that showed all the different colours of ageing with pride—rather than the slightly too long misty-grey bob Eliza had been wearing for so many years.

  She blinked, rousing herself, and voiced her greatest fear.

  ‘Do you think he knows?’

  The kettle clicked off and steam floated gently across Sunny’s neck. Eliza looked away, jiggling her chamomile teabag.

  ‘God, I hope not.’

  4

  Lara

  Lara woke at dawn, opening her eyes to see the thick wooden beams that held up the terracotta roof tiles above. A welcome cool breeze blew through the open double doors of the villa’s balcony, shifting aside the curtain to give her a glimpse of a sky not long emerged from darkness. The unfamiliar house was quiet. She eased herself up off the achingly hard mattress and stood to stretch and massage out the kinks and knots. Her feet were silent as she crossed the floor and stepped out onto the balcony to drink in the sight of dawn over the Tuscan valley.

  Yesterday evening, before a goat had darted under Samuel’s feet and sent him to the ground, she’d only been able to capture the view in broad brushstrokes—mountains, trees, vineyards. Now, with the sky turning a gentle rose colour, she could pick out the details of the many properties that made up the bowl of the valley in front of her. From her vantage point up on the ridge, she could see a mustard-coloured villa to her right that loomed over its yellow fields, next to a white church with a belltower. To her left, four white villas nestled close together, overlooking a slope planted with rows of green vines. On the other side of the valley, a road wound through clutches of ancient cypress trees, cars zooming between the trunks. And then there was the imposing villa up on the highest hill, a dull grey colour, neglected perhaps, but at least double the size of Samuel’s.

  She stood there for a moment, remembering all that had happened last night. Samuel’s accident. The short trip to the hospital in the nearby village of Fiotti-in-Chianti, the three of them in her hire car because Matteo’s truck was only a two-seater and someone (Matteo) had to sit beside Samuel to hold ice on his arm. The doctor telling Samuel he had a broken wrist and would have to stay in hospital overnight. In rapid Italian, with Matteo translating for Lara, the doctor had lectured Samuel about needing help at home, telling him that he couldn’t go home without someone to care for him. The word badante had come up several times.

  Carer. The young woman Samuel had been with in Rome had been his badante. But she hadn’t done a lot of caring as far as Lara could tell. Lara had stared at Matteo, waiting for him to say that he or someone else in the family could care for Samuel. But Matteo had turned away from her, murmuring something to Samuel. Samuel shook his head and patted Matteo’s arm in reassurance.

  ‘I can do it,’ she’d heard herself say from the corner of the hospital room. Matteo’s shoulders had dropped with relief; his eyes had softened.

  Samuel had accepted. But only because he said it wasn’t enough notice for the usual agency to help him and, besides, he would never trust them again after Reeba. Then he worried about his goats; they would need milking in the morning. So Matteo had said he would stay overnight at the villa and teach Lara how to milk.

  As cute as they were, Lara was robustly horrified at the idea of having to milk the goats, but hoped she’d managed to hide that from Samuel.

  Through these conversations, she’d started to gather tiny pieces of information about Samuel’s life. For the past fifteen years, since his wife had passed away, he’d slept in the downstairs bedroom, unable to ascend and descend the stairs safely anymore. Samuel had told them to find themselves rooms upstairs but not to go into the first bedroom on the right because that had been his and his wife’s.

  His wife’s name was Assunta.

  Now, with dawn’s misty optimism moving gently across the balcony and into her bedroom, Lara was still coming to terms with the fact that she’d landed in Rome only a little over twenty-four hours before and had spontaneously offered to care for an elderly man in a four-hundred-year-old villa in Tuscany. The world sure moved fast when you weren’t busy chasing late rental payments for Hilary, or watching Dora the Explorer and building skyscrapers with Daisy and Hudson. She missed them already.

  When they’d left the hospital, around midnight, she had asked Matteo to drive. Too bad about the insurance risk for an unlisted driver; she could barely keep her eyes open. At the villa they’d climbed the stairs together, Matteo carrying Lara’s bag for her. She was too tired to take in much, feeling as though she’d covered a week’s worth of experiences in one day. They’d stopped at the top of the stairs, Matteo so close that she could smell the antibacterial soap he’d used to wash his hands at the hospital. The door of what must have been Samuel and his wife’s bedroom was closed. She’d looked up from the round brass handle to Matteo’s face. His dark eyes reflected the moonlight streaming through the window on the landing.

  He broke eye contact first and stepped away. Her gaze followed his back as he moved to the other two bedrooms, switching on the lights inside.

  ‘Your choice,’ he said. She could see how weary he was too, his face pale.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, truly. I’m a stranger here. You pick one, please.’

  Matteo shrugged and pointed at random. ‘Thank you,’ he said, holding her gaze for a moment. ‘My u-un-cle was lucky you were there for him today.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said.

  He passed her the bag. ‘Well, goo-d-d-d night.’

  ‘’Night.’

  Their bedrooms were on either side of the bathroom, which had a deep iron bathtub, some missing tiles and a dripping tap.

  She should go there now, actually, and try to freshen up. She wheeled her whole carry-on bag to the bathroom, as it seemed easier than fishing
around in it for what she needed.

  Her mother had urged her to pack lightly. ‘Sarah from work had her luggage go missing once on an overseas trip and it took three weeks for them to find it and forward it on,’ Eliza had warned, sitting on the back steps of the house and watching Daisy and Hudson play in the sandpit under the leopard tree. ‘She was home again before they found the suitcase. She’d spent her whole holiday without her clothes or medicines or shoes.’

  Lara had been hanging out her washing, running through mental lists of things to organise before she left—copies of her passport and travel insurance, tiny bottles to take on the plane until she could find proper supplies in Italy, prescriptions filled and medicines packed, a doctor’s letter, a good pair of travelling boots. Sunny had helped, booking her the apartment in Rome, printing out her flight itinerary and labelling her luggage. Lara’s nerves had been bad that day, she remembered. A late season westerly had aggravated the raw skin on her wrist.

  Later that night, Sunny had come to Lara’s granny flat in the backyard while Lara had been laying out shirts, dresses and pants on her bed. Sunny’s long blonde hair was piled on top of her head. She was wearing one of the many handmade aprons that she collected from op shops to wear while painting, preferring the softness of well-worn cotton to some hot, plastic material. Each piece became a work of art in its own right as layer after layer of paint splashes was added to it. That night, Sunny reached into the front pocket of the yellow gingham apron and presented her little sister with a tube of paw paw ointment for her wrist. That simple, caring touch had almost undone Lara. Her eyes had filled, but Sunny had taken her by the chin and spoken sternly to her.

  ‘You can do this, Sprout.’

  Lara had done it. She’d got on the plane, and now here she was in a villa in the Tuscan hills.

  She found a towel in the rickety wooden chest of drawers in her room, which stood below an oversized framed print of Raphael’s angels, and took it to the bathroom, where she showered, standing in the deep old tub, and cleaned her teeth. She dressed in a pair of ultra-light white cotton pants and her favourite flowing three-quarter-sleeved shirt. V-necks always served her well, making the most of her bounty—a bounty every woman on her mother’s side of the family shared, except for Sunny. Her older sister was slim and toned, with small breasts that were annoyingly perfect for every style of clothing.

  In the mottled bathroom mirror, Lara looked weary and washed out, obvious shadows under her dark brown eyes. Her chestnut hair was wet from the shower, but she didn’t have a hairdryer, so all she could do was comb it out to air dry. She fished around in her toiletries bag for her tablets, which she took first thing every morning, and swallowed them with a handful of water.

  Matteo’s bedroom door was still shut.

  The concrete steps with the wrought-iron railing allowed her to go quietly downstairs—that was the beauty of a stone house as opposed to the Foxleighs’ wooden home back in Brisbane, which creaked and popped with movement day and night.

  The staircase snaked fully back on itself so that when she reached the ground floor she was confused as to where they’d come in last night. As she wandered, she got lost several times, with the house seeming to twist her around and send her out into yet another courtyard or entranceway. One door that seemed to lead to a bedroom actually opened onto what must have once been the receiving room, with huge double-wood doors to the outside and a marble fireplace.

  A short hallway led to a large L-shaped living room, with several couches and a shiny black Steinway & Sons piano. The room’s alcove held another deep fireplace, with green velvet upright chairs, footstools, walls lined with shelves of books, both Italian and English, on music, food and art, piles of sheet music, an old record player, a large tobacco pipe collection, metal servants’ bells and red woven rugs. More doorways, more windows and more confusion for Lara. There seemed to be double wooden doors everywhere she turned, leading to yet another room or opening to the beautiful outdoors.

  Beneath the house was a dusty, cluttered one-bedroom flat, with a spiral staircase leading up to the kitchen. And it was the kitchen that fired her imagination.

  It was easy to visualise generations of women bathing babies in that wide stone sink, filling it up with just enough water for the baby to splash. They’d chop onions, garlic and tomatoes on a wide board on the wooden kitchen table. Maybe a dog lay on the terracotta tiles at their feet. A young girl, learning to cook alongside her mamma and nonna, would carry in potatoes and carrots, stored produce from the vegetable garden; perhaps she caught the baby’s hands as he reached a little too far over the edge of the sink.

  Another girl would be on the other side of the kitchen’s half wall, bent over the fireplace where centuries of meals had been cooked. Maybe she’d be hanging a cast-iron pot over the flames and boiling water for those potatoes. From outside would come the sound of an axe falling rhythmically into logs, the sharp crack as the wood split; the son carried it inside, complaining that he was hungry.

  This was a home built for big families, life spilling out of every corner.

  ‘Buongiorno.’

  Lara spun on the tiles, startled by Matteo’s sudden appearance—the silence of this house worked for others too. He stood tall and offered no smile.

  ‘Buongiorno,’ she managed to reply.

  ‘Is there c-c-coffee?’ he asked, coming closer to her. He was still in yesterday’s clothes, though his socks and shoes were missing. He peered around the kitchen.

  They rummaged around in silence, looking for the coffee. Matteo found ground beans in a terracotta pot near the salt and pepper.

  ‘Thank God,’ he muttered.

  Lara laughed. ‘You need a coffee?’

  ‘I cannot th-think straight without one. I make no sense until the caffeine has reached my b-b-brain.’

  ‘I think you’re doing okay,’ she said, with just the tiniest edge of flirtatiousness, she was appalled to note. She felt heat rush to her ears.

  He looked at her sideways, just quickly, while spooning coffee into the pot. ‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked.

  ‘I did, thank you. I was so tired. I don’t think anything would have woken me.’

  Matteo added water to the pot and set it on the stove. ‘I am very grateful that you are able to st…ay and h-h-help Samuel. I feel…not good enough that I am not able to do more.’

  ‘Do you work?’ she asked, then felt ridiculous. Of course he would have responsibilities, a job and maybe a family of his own.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and there is no one else in the family who will help him.’

  Lara wondered at his use of the word will. Was that intentional or a slip of translation? His English did seem exceptionally good. But families were complicated; she knew that better than most.

  ‘I’m sorry if my uncle was less than gracious to you yesterday. He can be…’ Matteo rocked his head from side to side, a cheeky glint in his eye. ‘…I think the word is contrary?’

  ‘That’s probably the right word,’ she said, grinning in agreement. ‘Your English is excellent.’

  ‘I s-s-studied at university,’ he said, rubbing one eye with the palm of his hand, still struggling to fully wake up. Suddenly, he looked down at his clothes from yesterday. ‘I need to get changed. The coffee will be ready soon. Perhaps we should talk over breakfast.’

  ‘That sounds like a good idea,’ she said, and firmly told herself to ignore the fluttering of attraction she felt watching the back of his neck as he walked away. As if her life wasn’t complicated enough right now! Fantasies of romance were the last thing she needed.

  5

  Lara and Dave

  Lara was nineteen when she met Dave at the Peaceful Valley Animal Shelter, about forty-five minutes from her home. She was wearing men’s working overalls, trying to be like her sister, because Sunny was so much cooler than her. Not that she would admit that to Sunny. But Sunny was the sort of person who could pick up some ugly old jumper from an op shop and
add a scarf and on-trend bracelet and look dazzling and edgy and oh so bored with the world. Her sister was living in a share house in West End, hanging out with other struggling artist types, painting by day and working in a bar at night. Lara wore the overalls hoping to catch just a bit of Sunny’s self-assurance. In drama classes, they made her feel like she belonged alongside her gregarious classmates, and they also did nicely here at the shelter.

  Lara and Dave had both been assigned to clean the cat cages. She’d seen him here a few Saturdays back. When she’d seen his name on the duty roster she’d hoped she might have a chance to be partnered with him. Then, one day, she was.

  ‘Hi, I’m Dave,’ he said, holding out his hand. He had almond-shaped green eyes and thick curly brown hair and an easy confidence.

  ‘I’m Lara.’ Now she felt slightly underdressed in her overalls, next to Dave with his tucked-in collared shirt, belted jeans and clean shoes. She took his hand and he held hers for a touch longer than necessary, and her hopes soared. She just knew that he was different to all the boys at uni. The silly boys who kicked cans at lunchtime or skived off in lectures as if they were still in the back row of maths class in high school. The boys who compared their weekend drinking binges to see who got the most slammed. The boys who stank of either body odour or cheap deodorant. No, Dave was nothing like them. He looked quite a bit older, for a start, and took pride in his appearance. And the fact that he was here, on a Saturday, volunteering his time at the shelter just like her, said it all.

  They cleaned thirty cat cages together and Lara cuddled every inmate, letting them push their heads up under her chin and purr and purr. Her heart broke a little with every one she had to return to the cage, locking the door behind it. She’d always wanted a cat or a dog, but Eliza had firmly said no, vet bills would cost too much and pets made it hard to go on holiday. Not that that argument mattered at all, because they almost never went anywhere. Eliza had finally given in and allowed her a pair of guinea pigs in the backyard when she was in primary school. But Lara was determined that the moment she moved out of home she was getting a cat or a dog, maybe both. She would let them sleep on her bed at night and curl on her lap while she worked on her laptop.