I looked at Annabelle’s letter again, the address in town where they were staying, and tried not to think about the plurality of her words – you know where we are, we’re here for a couple of months – Annabelle and the boy she stole from me by the river as green as the ink in her pen.
A few days later I was walking up a street lined with laurel trees to the townhouse Annabelle and Josh ‘maintained’ in the city while they travelled. I had read that once in a magazine feature on them – The stylish couple maintain an inner-city sanctuary which is home to the two nomads (which Duncan later crossed out and changed to ‘gonads’) when they return to Australia.
And now I was right outside that inner-city abode, as agitated and nervous as if I was on a first date with both of them.
Annabelle opened the door before I rang the bell. ‘I’ve been waiting,’ she said, ‘all morning actually; Josh went out, said he couldn’t stand watching me pace.’
‘Oh,’ I managed, following her up the stairs leading to the lounge room. With huge black and white photos on every wall, it was like being surrounded by a giant chequerboard. I put my bag down and sat on a couch, my hands in my lap.
‘You look like you’re waiting outside Sister Scholastica’s office,’ Annabelle smiled at me, and I relaxed a little and managed to reply: ‘Not likely, considering I’m here to score drugs. For Duncan,’ I added, ‘not me.’
Annabelle nodded, never easily thrown, and asked if I’d like a coffee or tea.
‘Tea, please,’ I said, ‘white and one.’
‘Still the same, then,’ she said and a small part of me, for some reason, bristled.
‘Not quite,’ I answered, determined not to be thrown by her either.
When she came back with the tea, she sat opposite me on a huge, deep couch, her legs tucked under her, thin and angular, and almost, I thought, to coin an old phrase, disapanishing within its folds.
She was beautiful, no matter what Duncan said, the hollows of her cheeks had filled out, and she’d cut her hair so a blunt fringe now fell across her forehead.
It suited her, dammit, everything, I thought, looking around the townhouse, suited her.
The chequerboard walls were filled with shots of Josh and Annabelle on their travels and images of wild-eyed men and women, though none as startling as a picture of Annie, naked and panting on the floor.
‘When she had me,’ Annabelle said. ‘I don’t think you’ve ever seen that one, have you?’
‘No, it’s very, well, it’s sort of confronting, isn’t it?’
‘Confronting? No, I don’t think so, I think it’s very comforting.’
‘Well, she doesn’t look very comfortable to me.’
Annabelle laughed and said, ‘God I’ve missed you, Tallulah.’
I wasn’t ready for it. I wasn’t ready for her and so I said nothing, just sipped my tea.
‘Your friend Duncan, he said you missed me.’
‘What?’
‘Duncan, that night at Bloom, he said that he was your dearest friend in the world, a position he understood I had left vacant, and thanked me for.’ She was holding my eyes steady with hers, but her words – Duncan’s words actually – were coming out in a rush. ‘He said that although he had done his best you, for reasons he wasn’t entirely sure of, still missed me, and then he said that due to unforeseen circumstances he would soon be leaving the position vacant once more and he was offering it back to me – provided I met certain requirements.’
I sat there, hearing Duncan’s voice, the words sounding so utterly like him.
‘What were they?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice as steady as her gaze.
But she had dropped her eyes. ‘He said I could have your friendship back provided I didn’t go off and shag your current boyfriend underneath some rickety pier.’
The silence filled every space between us.
‘And then he said,’ Annabelle lifted her head and cocked it, ‘“not that I personally have anything against water sports, my dear”.’
I couldn’t help it, I laughed, at Duncan, at Annabelle’s near-perfect imitation of him, and at me, sitting in Annabelle and Josh’s ‘inner-city sanctuary’ – which Duncan had, also, rather predictably I told him, crossed out and changed to ‘wanctuary’ – like I was the sort of girl who knew the sort of people who maintained them.
Annabelle laughed with me, then abruptly took the cup from my hands and disappeared into the kitchen, coming back with a refill and saying, ‘So, tell me about Rose, Tallulah, how is she? Every time I saw a kimono in Japan, I thought of her. I bought her one, actually, I’ve kept it for a couple of years, it’s in a box upstairs. I thought she might like to call it “Cherry”, after the blossoms, of course. I’ll show it to you if you like,’ she said, almost running up the stairs, and I realised two things.
First of all, Annabelle Andrews had missed me, and my family, just as much as I had missed her. And two, she was nervous.
When we’d last met, it was me who couldn’t stop talking; this time it was Annabelle tripping over her own tongue in her hurry to get the words out.
She kept asking questions: how was Harry? Was he still plumbing the depths of excellence? What about the twins? How old were they now? ‘I bet they’re handsome,’ she said, ‘I’d love to see them.’ She even asked about Simone and Stella, and when I was leaving, as she was handing me the kimono for Rose, she said, ‘We should catch up again, I’d like to meet Ben properly. Maybe the four of us could all go out to dinner?’
I felt a tiny, delicious – and childish – sense of power, that for once it was her doing the asking, and me doing the deciding.
‘Maybe, I’ll check with Ben. He’s away a lot on business trips – overseas,’ I added unnecessarily, looking, I imagined, like a woman who was not easily thrown.
*
A fortnight after I visited Annabelle, Ben went away on a buying trip to Malaysia, but not before the four of us – Josh, Annabelle, Ben and I – endured dinner together at a Nepalese restaurant.
Ben hadn’t wanted to go, but I had pushed, wanting, I suppose, to show them that I had a life of my own, with a man who went on buying trips to Asia, and knew what wine to bring.
I’d told Ben it would be fun, that Josh and Annabelle knew the owners. ‘Of course they do,’ he’d said under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear.
But we had gone, and sat at a booth festooned with prayer flags, Annabelle and I on one side, Josh opposite us, arms spread out across the back of the seat, lazily interrogating Ben in a chair at the end of the table.
‘You’re in shoes, aren’t you, Ben?’ Josh drawled, taking a swig of his Corona.
Ben nodded. ‘It’s a family business, Moreton’s Shoes . . .’
‘Keeping Australia on Its Feet Since 1967,’ Josh smiled, then added, ‘you must be buggered, mate.’
Annabelle and I laughed, but Ben didn’t, grimly ploughing through the momos on his plate. ‘Actually, Lulu and I like to tell people that in between my family keeping Australia on its feet and hers plumbing the depths of excellence, we’ve got the nation’s best interests covered.’
I was embarrassed, for him, for me, and sent a prayer up to the flags that I could just disappear from this booth where Josh was saying, ‘Well, that’s very patriotic of you, mate.’
Sitting with Josh and Annabelle made me realise how suburban Ben and I had become, how pale in comparison.
Everything about Ben seemed wrong that night: his hair; his chequered shirt; his blue jeans, too low on his hips; his voice, too high; his shoes, too polished. He looked, I thought, too try-hard, and I was too stupid back then to realise that’s exactly what he was doing, and to love him for it.
On the way home I said to him in the car, grouchily, bitchily, ‘You know, Ben, it’s not me that likes to say that about our families having the nation’s best interes
ts covered, it’s you.’
Ben kept his eyes on the road. ‘Sorry, Lulu,’ he said, not flinching. ‘I thought it was us.’ When he left early the next morning, he did not wake me, and I did not mind.
With Ben away, Duncan at Lingalonga with his first wife Kiki and their son Duncan Junior, Mattie and Sam studying for university exams and Rose, according to Harry, the best she had been in months, I found myself with days to fill.
So I filled them with Josh and Annabelle.
Annabelle rang and suggested that the three of us do lunch, then a dinner, then a walk in the mountains, and in between there was a blur of bars and basement art galleries – places in my city I did not know existed and would not be able to find again in the daytime.
We roamed the streets with arms linked, through back alleys that rose and fell like breaths, and tumbled through doorways into bars with no names and people determinedly wearing black behind them.
I felt heady between them – Josh’s laugh against my ear, Annabelle standing beside me in nightclub bathrooms, our eyes meeting in the mirror. ‘You look splendifigous,’ she smiled at me.
We shared breakfasts in sunny cafés, Annabelle quiet behind her sunglasses, Josh pretending he knew how to do the cryptic crossword while I sat eating cinnamon toast, feeling like I belonged to both of them.
On about our seventh night out, we were at one of their friend’s places, with people strewn like scatter cushions around it, when Annabelle said she was not feeling well, and wanted to go home.
I remember half-getting up, saying, ‘I’ll come with you,’ but she shook her head.
‘No need,’ she said. ‘You stay and have fun. I’ll see you at home later, Josh.’
She slipped through the door, and Josh and I sat on a couch with a woman who kept insisting she had met him before, and I knew long before she did that she was irritating him.
‘Come on, Lulu,’ he said, standing up, ‘let’s go.’
We couldn’t get a taxi, so we started walking our way out of the city, through the backstreets, past low-slung telegraph wires with quivering possums running along them.
It was the first time we had been alone since the night we’d said goodbye, the same white moon, it seemed, watching us.
I could hear our breathing, our boots on the road, and if nothing else but to break the silence, I said, ‘This feels strange, doesn’t it, Josh? Sort of strange and familiar at the same time.’
He smiled. ‘Strangely familiar, you might say.’
A garbage truck roared around the corner, its orange lights making me jump back to the footpath, Josh close beside me. The truck’s huge arm reached out to pick up a bin, a huge claw plucking chocolates out of an amusement arcade machine, then it rumbled off into the early morning, its steel belly swaying like a pregnant woman’s.
We walked a few more steps, then Josh stopped underneath a street lamp and tilted my chin up to its light.
‘So I can see you,’ he said, and leant over and kissed me.
Somewhere not too far away I could still hear the truck’s rumble, but I was caught in a memory where nothing had changed, my head filling with sadness and elation and the same, delicious rush of him.
*
Driving my car onto the barge to Willow Island the next day, I sat in it long after I felt the boat pull away from the dock, closing my eyes in the sun that warmed its way through the windows.
I reclined my seat and felt the steady rhythm of the boat’s engines somewhere beneath me, dozing until Walter Prentice’s tanned leather face appearing at the window woke me.
‘You all right, Lulu?’ he said. ‘Going across to see Duncan?’
‘Yeah, just visiting for a few days,’ I said.
‘Better get a coffee into you before we get there,’ he said, ‘we’re only about fifteen minutes away.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, opening the door and heading up the narrow steps to the café, the steel rail gritty beneath my hand.
I was glad to be visiting Duncan, and leaving behind the imprint of Josh’s kiss. I could still feel it, the hardness of it on my lips, his hands trailing from my face to my neck, marking my skin with his, as surely, I thought, as a bruise.
‘Did you want a coffee? I’m about to shut down the machine.’
I was, I realised, standing at the counter with my own fingers on my mouth.
‘I’m sorry, miles away, yes, I’d love one, if there’s time,’ I answered the man standing behind the counter.
He smiled.
‘Always time for a coffee – Tallulah, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I answered him, realising I had never seen him on the barge before, and wondering how he knew my name.
‘Will,’ he said, putting out his hand for me to shake, ‘I’m a mate of Duncan’s actually. I’ve been doing a bit of work for him over on Willow. He said you’d be on the barge and asked me to look out for you – I’ve just started a bit of deckie work for Walter too.’
‘Oh, nice,’ I smiled, not knowing what else to say, then adding completely unnecessarily, ‘I’m a mate of Duncan’s too.’
‘Well, mate of Duncan’s, let me make you a very fine coffee and help that hangover of yours.’
‘Is it that obvious?’ I smiled back.
‘Yeah,’ he grinned, ‘you’ve got that whole sweaty thing that women get the next day going on.’
Charming, I thought, surreptitiously taking a serviette to dab at the sides of my nose.
‘So, are you from the island?’ I asked, in an attempt to seem like a normal person as he frothed my milk.
‘Yes and no,’ he answered. ‘It’s a bit of a long story. I’ll tell it to you some time,’ he raised his eyebrows, ‘maybe when you’re in a better state – not so sweaty.’
He smiled, and despite his obvious obsession with perspiration, I smiled back.
Even through my bloodshot eyes I could see Will, friend of Duncan’s, was a very attractive man, tall, salt and pepper hair, crinkly, dark eyes, dimple in his chin, the sort of man a girl could get herself in a sweat over, should she be so inclined.
I wasn’t, life was complex enough, so I thanked him for the coffee and sat at a booth looking out at the sea, watching as Willow came into view, glad there was now an ocean between Josh’s lips and mine.
Somewhere between the start of that kiss and the end, a taxi had turned into the street and I was suddenly desperate to get in it.
I uncurled myself from Josh’s arms and began flailing my own about, like a woman caught in a rip, trying to attract a lifesaver’s attention instead of just hailing a cab.
Not waving, but drowning.
The taxi slowed to a stop, and I fled.
*
When I got to Lingalonga, I unpacked my bag in the guest room, taking in the familiar fishing photos on the walls, the faces of sun-glazed children smiling at the camera through hot-pink zinc-smeared noses, and the women holding them tight against the sea.
I had relaxed the moment I walked through the door, giving myself over to the timelessness of it, the mobiles dangling in the doorway, knotted with sticks and twigs and shells and feathers made by little hands, still grainy with sand.
I took the bag of pot out of my bag and went to the kitchen, where Duncan was making tea.
‘Here you are, you old hippie,’ I said, tossing the pot on the table.
‘Well done, Lulu,’ Duncan smiled, ‘where did you get it?’
‘Annabelle.’
Duncan raised his eyebrows.
‘I’ve been spending a bit of time with her, actually,’ I said. ‘Her and Josh.’
Duncan’s eyebrows lifted a fraction higher.
‘Does Ben know?’
‘Know what? That you’ve turned me into a drug dealer?’
‘No – don’t be arch, Lulu, it doesn’t suit you. Does Ben know
that the band’s back together again?’
‘Not really, but he’s away a lot at the moment.’
‘How very convenient.’
‘Shut up, Duncan, you’re the one who wanted me to get closure.’
‘I did, but now I look at you and I’m not entirely sure that’s what you’re getting . . .’ He put the tea down in front of me, and let the sentence dangle in mid-air.
Later, he was lying on the couch, his hand buried deep in Barney’s fur beside him. I was sitting opposite him, reading aloud from one of his favourite books, The Swimmer, something we would do more and more of as he rested his voice and his bones. Neddy Merrill was about to take the plunge into one of the many suburban pools he would attempt to swim his way home in when Duncan’s voice interrupted me.
‘I think you’d better stay here until Ben gets back,’ he said, ‘where Barney and I can keep an eye on you.’
I kept reading, half-annoyed at his proprietary tone, and half-relieved to hear it.
*
I stayed on at Willow with Duncan for about a week, but there wasn’t much for me to do.
Later there would be brow-wiping and hand-holding; later still there would be pain I couldn’t relieve no matter how many morphine patches I slapped on him; later there would be long nights of trying to calm his dreams, but for now Duncan was still upright.
The pain had not felled him, it had only slowed him down, lending everything we did together – walking, throwing a stick to Barney, cooking mussels from the trawler in the big, silver saucepan – an unhurried feel. But whatever we did, we could only do it for about an hour at a time, before Duncan would make his way back to the sofa and I’d arrange the commemorative quilt from the ladies of the McLean Valley around him.
I left when his second wife, Kerry-Anne, arrived – he had, by now, told all the Ks, if not the children. She was on her own, without Rhees and called from the door: ‘Where are you, you old bastard?’
‘Still got a thing for me,’ Duncan smiled from his chair.
When I got home, I cleaned the flat for Ben’s homecoming, put fresh sheets on the bed, dusted, vacuumed and opened the windows ‘to let the air in’, as Rose would say, although I knew inside that what I was really doing was trying to get the scent of my own transgressions out.
Walking on Trampolines Page 17