Walking on Trampolines

by Frances Whiting

  About Walking on Trampolines

  ‘Tallulah de Longland,’ she said slowly, letting all the Ls in my name loll about lazily in her mouth before passing judgement. ‘That,’ she announced, ‘is a seriously glamorgeous name.’

  From the day Annabelle Andrews sashays into her classroom, Tallulah ‘Lulu’ de Longland is bewitched: by Annabelle, by her family, and their sprawling, crumbling house tumbling down to the river.

  Their unlikely friendship intensifies through a secret language where they share confidences about their unusual mothers, first loves, and growing up in the small, coastal town of Juniper Bay. Their lives become as entwined as Annabelle’s initials engraved beneath the de Longland kitchen table.

  But the euphoria of youth rarely lasts, and the implosion that destroys their friendship leaves lasting scars and a legacy of self-doubt that haunts Lulu into adulthood.

  Years later, Lulu is presented with a choice: remain the perpetual good girl who misses out, or finally step out from the shadows and do something extraordinary.

  And possibly unforgiveable.

  It’s not how far you fall, but how high you bounce.

  Cover

  About Walking on Trampolines

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About Frances Whiting

  Also by Frances Whiting

  Copyright page

  To John, Max and Tallulah

  His skin.

  My fingers could trace the path it has travelled.

  Comma-shaped scar on left knee – bike crash, ‘Red Demon’ dragster, 1974; stitches above right eyebrow – fin chop, Cabarita, 1982; faint outline of navy blue, home-made tattoo on left wrist – high school, my name.

  I know this skin, I know how it feels, I know how it smells, I know every single inch of him.

  Joshua Keaton.

  He rolls towards me in the ocean of a bed we are lying in at the Hotel du Laurent, restless and hot beneath its cool sheets.

  Little waves of nausea tumble through my stomach and my head aches at each throbbing temple – precursors, I know, to a hangover that could, as Simone would say, fell a buffalo.

  I slip out of the bed and go to the bathroom to stare raccoon-eyed into the mirror and consider the girl who has done this thing.

  There is something caught in my hair, small and rosy and round.

  Confetti.

  From the church yesterday, where we stood on the cobblestones, surrounded by women in hats and children squeezing through pin-striped legs.

  My father had put his hand on my cheek just before we went in. ‘It will be all right, you know, Lulu,’ he had said – and it was.

  When I entered the church, Josh had turned to look at me, and in that moment it all faded away, the sandalwood candles, the clutches of tiny pink rosebuds tied to the pews, and I was back at the counter of Snow’s corner store, where Josh and I stood staring at each other with dumbstruck smiles on our sixteen-year-old faces.

  I had walked up the aisle on the strength of that look, walked towards Josh determined, from this day forth, for better or worse, to think only about where we were heading, instead of always tugging at every detail of where we had been.

  I slide back into the bed and Josh moves towards me, resting his head on my chest, where it rises and falls with my breath, his dark curls caught beneath my fingers, his arms reaching out for me in the half-light, his eyes sleepily opening to widen in horror.

  ‘Lulu,’ he says, ‘what the hell?’

  He sits bolt upright in the bed and a torrent of swear words fall from his lips, raining down on us like yesterday’s confetti.

  Because while I may have woken up in a tangle of just-married sheets beside Joshua Keaton and his all-too-familiar skin, I was not his bride.

  There is a moment in panic when time stills, suspended like Chinese lanterns across a street, and in that instant you can fool yourself that everything will be all right if you just stay calm.

  There was a polite knock at the door, a short, sharp rap, like a cough, followed by a series of much louder ones, fists hammering against the wood.

  I took Josh, who was flailing around the hotel room and tripping over the white sheet he was holding to his chest as if it could somehow cover what he had done – what we had done – into the bathroom.

  ‘Josh,’ I said, holding his shoulders and trying to keep him still long enough to look him in the eye, ‘we’ve got to stay calm. I’m fairly sure that’s Annabelle out there and we’ve got to try to explain why you’re here before she comes in and kills us both.’

  Josh’s eyes opened wide as the reality of the situation dawned on him.

  But it was too late – we both heard the hotel-room door open, and with it, the arrival of Cyclone Annabelle.

  I peeped out to see her standing beside a terrified-looking duty manager, clutching a set of master keys in his hand, then shut the door as quietly as I could.

  ‘Joshua,’ Annabelle’s voice cut across the room, dripping icy courtesy. ‘Come out of that bathroom now, and Tallulah, could you come out too, please?’

  It was the ‘please’ that did it.

  I had known Annabelle Andrews since she was twelve years old; I had seen her angry, I had heard her hiss and steam and yell like a banshee when things had not gone her way, I had seen her weep, knock to the ground a man in a nightclub who had been rude to her, reduce several others to tears, but I had never, ever seen her be polite.

  Truly petrified now, I pushed Josh out the door to face her and locked myself in.

  In a matter of seconds, after a few muffled shouts and one big bang which must have been the door slamming, it fell silent.

  I lay down on the tiled floor, letting its coolness embrace me, and as the hotel room’s air-conditioning system buzzed quietly in the background, I closed my eyes and remembered.

  Everything.

  *

  I was twelve years old when Annabelle Andrews sashayed into my life via my Grade Seven classroom, straight past Sister Scholastica, who was attempting to beam out her usual introduction.

  ‘All right girls, please meet the latest addition to the St Rita’s family, Annabelle Andrews, who has come to our lovely Juniper Bay from Sydney where she . . . Annabelle, we haven’t chosen a place for you yet.’

  ‘That’s all right, Sister,’ Annabelle replied. ‘I’ll just sit here.
’

  Not ‘May I sit here?’ Not ‘Is there anybody else sitting here?’ But ‘I’ll just sit here.’

  Dropping her books on the desk next to mine, Annabelle Andrews grinned from ear to ear, sat down, and claimed me as her own.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she whispered as Sister Scholastica flapped around us, clearly upset by this diversion from the usual proceedings.

  ‘Tallulah,’ I whispered back.

  ‘Tallulah who?’

  ‘De Longland,’ I answered. ‘But nobody calls me Tallulah – everyone calls me Lulu.’

  ‘Tallulah de Longland,’ she said slowly, ignoring me and letting all the Ls in my name loll about lazily in her mouth before passing judgement.

  ‘That,’ she announced, ‘is a seriously glamorgeous name.’

  Annabelle liked to hitch parts of words together, hooking them up to form new ones, making her own language. She would eventually allow me to share in this language, and if I came up with a word she particularly liked, she’d exclaim in a mock-English accent, ‘Tallulah, that’s brilltaking!’

  Annabelle’s language quickly became a way for us to speak to each other that pretty much excluded everybody else – which suited Annabelle just fine.

  ‘After all,’ as she would tell me again and again as she dragged me away from Stella Kelly and Simone Wilson, who up until Annabelle’s arrival had been my closest friends, ‘why should we waste time with people who are, let’s be honest, Tallulah, bordinary?’

  At the end of that first morning, during which Annabelle had stood – or rather sat – her ground and refused to budge from her position next to me, it was a done deal.

  She never from that moment on called me Lulu; it was always Tallulah and we were, for better or worse, best friends.

  God, I loved her.

  She was hilariocious.

  I sometimes wonder if Annabelle chose me purely because of my name. Stuffed to its nylon seams with Tracey Stewarts and Lorraine O’Neills, Tallulah de Longland was about as glamorgeous as it was going to get at St Rita’s School for Young Ladies or, as Annabelle called it, St Rita’s School for Young Lesbians.

  But choose me, for reasons I could never really understand, she did, and when I first started going to Annabelle’s house, in all its glorious mayhem, with her mother Annie’s dramatic announcements and her father Frank absent-mindedly wandering about, I used to worry that it would all be taken away from me.

  I thought that Annabelle would catch me out; she would open those green cat’s eyes of hers and see that I didn’t belong there.

  She would wake up one morning, realise that I was an intruder, and toss me back to the Traceys and Lorraines, where I really belonged. ‘Oh my God, Tallulah,’ I imagined she would cry, ‘I never realised you were so tediocre!’

  But she never did, and eventually, somewhere along the journey of our daily walks home, arguing about whose house we would go to, I stopped expecting her to.

  Even now, I cannot think of Annabelle without thinking of her house – known throughout the Bay as ‘the River House’, it sat guarded by twin gargoyles at its gates, its roof lines slowly disappearing beneath a cloak of intertwining branches, and its garden tumbling all the way down to the river.

  ‘I live in a jungle,’ Annabelle would sigh dramatically every time we got to her front gate. She was right, but this ignored the fact there was a beautiful, if crumbling, house underneath it, and somewhere within its beehive walls were Annabelle’s parents, Frank and Annie.

  Everyone knew who they were, of course, the arrival of the Andrews in our small coastal town akin to someone letting out a flock of peacocks on our front lawns. Both well-known artists ‘from Sydney’, everyone kept repeating, as if it was another country, which, I suppose, it may as well have been.

  My first visit to the River House was on a Friday afternoon after school, and remembering it is like pressing the replay button on a DVD, beginning with Frank opening the front door with a flourish: ‘You must be Tallulah,’ he said. ‘Come in, come in, I have made you some round lamingtons! What do you think of that?’

  What did I think of that?

  I thought Frank Andrews was the most wonderful man I had ever met. He was old-school Hollywood handsome; his face, like all the Andrews men, was a beaten-up road map of deep ruts and jagged edges, crossed tracks and lines like cliff drops falling from cheekbones.

  He was tanned walnut brown, long and lean, his sinewy arms and legs always encased in a white Bonds singlet and olive-green shorts, both, like Frank, daubed in paint. ‘If I ever die and leave you destitute, Annie,’ he’d said one day as we all lay on the grass at the River House, ‘you have my permission to cut off one of my limbs and sell it as a Frank Andrews original.’

  ‘Just one, Frank?’ Annie had replied.

  Frank laughed, and pulled the Greek fisherman’s cap Annie said was welded to his head over his eyes.

  He was beautiful, Frank Andrews, and I think I was probably a little bit in love with him from the moment he opened the door and offered an unsure twelve year old the worst lamingtons she had ever tasted in her short life.

  We had sat at the table that first afternoon – Frank, Annabelle and I – eating them, while Annabelle’s eyes rolled with every bite and his crinkled at the corners with mischief.

  ‘What? You don’t like them, Belle? What do you think, Tallulah de Lovely?’

  ‘I think they’re very nice, Mr Andrews,’ I’d said, as Annabelle snorted sarcastically.

  Then Frank smiled his crinkly smile at me. ‘When you’re ready,’ he’d said, ‘you can call me Frank.’

  Whenever I came upon him in that house – and that was how it always felt with Frank, that you didn’t so much see him as come upon him unexpectedly – he would always say something that made me feel really good inside; he would call me Tallulah de Lightful or Tallulah de Lovely, and Annabelle would say, ‘More like Tallulah de Mented’ and the three of us would laugh like hyenas.

  I don’t remember meeting Annie that first day, and I guess I didn’t, because I should imagine everyone would recall their first brush with Annie Andrews.

  Annie with her burnt copper hair tangled in bobby pins and scarves. Annie with her scarab beetle brooches and bracelets snaking up her arms. You could, as Annabelle always said, hear Annie long before her actual entrance – and it was always an entrance with Annie, even if she was just returning from the bathroom.

  The only quiet thing about Annie was her voice, low and raspy; sometimes to hear it you had to lean right in to her, lean right in to her Annie-ness.

  ‘Men love it, Lulu,’ she told me once at the River House, and I had no reason to doubt it. Even if Annie hadn’t been with Frank, even if she hadn’t married into Australian art royalty, their 1964 wedding making the cover of the Women’s Weekly under the banner ‘The Perfect Picture’, even if she hadn’t recreated that cover in one of her own paintings, replacing Frank’s head with a peacock’s and her own with a fish hook, Annie would have found a way to get noticed.

  They certainly noticed her in Juniper Bay.

  ‘So you went to the Andrews’ place?’ my father, Harry, had said that night at dinner – a typical feast served up by my mother, Rose: roast lamb, herbed potatoes, butternut pumpkin mash, sweet potato gratin, mint peas, honeyed carrots, bread rolls, butter, gravy, followed by rhubarb crumble with double cream. (‘Honestly, Lulu, it’s a wonder you’re not gargantormous,’ Annabelle used to say, ‘it really is.’)

  ‘And . . .’

  ‘And what?’ I said, rolling my eyes in a repeat of Annabelle’s performance earlier that afternoon.

  ‘And did they roll you in honey and make you bay at the moon? Did they whisk you away to an opium den? Did they . . .’ Harry gasped, ‘pierce your ears?’

  I was the only girl at St Rita’s whose ears remained bare – Rose would not let me pierce th
em. She always said, in words she’d ultimately wish she’d never uttered, that they made girls look like ‘Kings Cross prostitutes’ – Rose, who had never been to the Cross, let alone seen a prostitute hawking her wares there.

  ‘Very funny, Harry,’ Rose said, coming in with more potatoes, but behind Harry’s teasing lay the sort of gossip that had ignited around Juniper Bay ever since the Andrews had turned up like exotic cats let loose in Juniper Bay. It was the most exciting thing that had happened there since a suitcase full of American dollars had washed up on Wattle Beach in the fifties – ‘mob money’ everyone had said, thrilled at the very sound of the words.

  The Andrews were usually described as ‘Australia’s premier artistic family’, their branches sprinkled with painters, sculptors, architects, playwrights and poets. They were famous and infamous at once; people who had never stood before a painting in their entire lives still knew who Annabelle’s family were.

  Frank’s father, ‘Craggy Jack’ Andrews, was one of the world’s most respected landscape artists, granted the honour of an Australia Post stamp bearing his image. Annie had famously said to a reporter on his death: ‘Well, at least we can all still lick the back of his head.’

  Frank’s mother, Christa, still alive, still hurling paint at enormous canvasses from rickety ladders in her whitewashed studio, was famous in her own right for her work, and for taking Craggy Jack back time and time again, shame-faced and pin-pricked at her door, after one of his frequent disappearances.

  Fergus, Frank’s older brother was a documentary filmmaker, a man who travelled the world tracking down rare and endangered species, lost tribes and – Annie said – loose women.

  There was, it seemed, no great affection between Annie and her brother-in-law; Annabelle told me once there had been a flurry of letters between lawyers, and very nearly a court case, when Annie had said to a reporter of Frank’s famous brother, ‘Oh yes, Fergus is marvellous, the way he ventures to those remote, undiscovered places, and impregnates all the women.’ Frank had made Annie apologise, and it had all blown over, but the following Christmas, according to Annabelle, Fergus sent everyone glass beads from Ghana – everyone except Annie.