I climbed all the way into him and we rocked back and forth, together.
*
It was an accident.
Nothing more than an accident with no-one to blame, no blood on anyone’s hands, least of all Rose’s, holding on to the wheel of her station wagon, on her way to the shops in to get dinner in Greta. The other driver had been lost, distracted, Rose trying to get out of the way, too late, hitting the pole, all over quickly.
‘She wouldn’t have felt anything,’ the policewoman told Harry, Mattie, Sam and me, sitting across from us on the couch and eating Rose’s biscuits. ‘When things like this happen so quickly, it’s very comforting, I think, to know that the person involved didn’t feel anything – it’s so quick, you see,’ she continued.
Harry and I looked at each other and the woman who didn’t see anything at all because she didn’t know Rose, did not know that Rose felt everything.
*
Later that night, I went to say goodnight to Mattie and Sam, Barney padding behind me like a shadow.
They were both stretched out on their childhood beds, much too small for them now, of course.
‘I’m going to sleep,’ I said, ‘do you need anything?’
‘Can Barney stay with us?’ Mattie asked.
‘Of course – up, Barney,’ I told him, patting Mattie’s bed.
I sat down at the end of Sam’s, and he flung his feet over my lap.
We were tumbling back in time in this room, with its fading rocket wallpaper and glow-in-the-dark stickers still clinging to the ceiling.
I had sat at the end of these beds so many nights, the three of us and Zac McCain and his very large brain. I would tell stories until Mattie pulled his quilt up to his chin, and Sam drew his feet up to his knees, then quietly reach over to switch off the lights, and leave them to their dreaming.
Even though they were far closer to men than boys, I began to tell stories again now, grown-up versions of Zac McCain. I told them about the plans for the WIASA, how I’d like them to help out Will in their uni holidays, repairing and repainting all the water sports gear, and if enough guests came, taking small groups on guided tours down the river.
I talked into the night, until Mattie pulled his quilt to his chin, his legs so long it left his feet exposed beneath it. I talked until Sam drew his feet up to his knees, and I heard them both relax in the darkness, Mattie’s grunts eventually joined by Sam’s deep breaths.
I stood up to turn off their lamps, and Barney lifted his head.
‘Stay,’ I told him, and he settled back down, Mattie’s leg thrown over the arch of his back.
Then I went downstairs to check on Harry.
‘The boys are asleep.’
‘Thanks, Lulu.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘I’m sorry, love, I just can’t seem to help them at the moment.’
Harry in his dressing-gown, his reading glasses in his pocket.
‘You’ll lose those, you know,’ I said automatically, in my mother’s voice.
Rose was always trying to mend the holes in his gown’s pockets, but Harry wouldn’t let her, dangling his fingers out of the bottom and saying, ‘Leave it, I like them the way they are.’
Harry pushed his fingers through and waggled them at me.
‘Hello Rosey-girl,’ he said, and I knew my father was undone.
I waggled my fingers back at him anyway.
*
‘Have you done anything,’ Father Duffy asked the next day, ‘about the arrangements?’
Harry looked out the window and I answered for both of us.
‘No, we’ve just been here at home, with Mattie and Sam.’
Father Duffy nodded his head, and looked at Harry.
‘It isn’t easy,’ he said, ‘it’s never easy, that’s why I’ve come, to help, if you need it.’
Rose had always liked Joe Duffy, I remembered, said he liked a laugh, and didn’t mind if you sometimes didn’t laugh with him.
‘We need it,’ I told him, ‘we seem to have no idea what to do.’
‘I do,’ Father Duffy replied. ‘Rose told me.’
*
Rose’s ashes were scattered near the lake where she’d once dived naked and wonderful and had told Harry to do the same.
‘It seems so far away,’ he had fretted, ‘it doesn’t seem right she’s not near us.’
But Rose had left instructions about where she wanted to be, who she wanted to wear – Alexis, who would never go anywhere quietly – what she wanted to hear: ‘No ballads’ she had written firmly, then in capitals: ‘NO ORGAN MUSIC WHATSOEVER.’
So we said our goodbyes to Rose in the church in the town where she had grown up under the watchful eyes of the two sisters, Audrey and Constance.
‘Why do you think your mum wanted the service here?’ Simone asked me afterwards, ‘instead of St Rita’s?’
I wasn’t entirely sure but I told her what I thought, that Rose had wanted to leave the earth from the first place she’d felt safe on it.
*
We had a morning tea in the hall next to the church, everyone ‘bringing a plate’ mostly, I noticed, of biscuits and slices made from Rose’s recipes, but none of them tasting quite the same.
When the last person had left – Mrs Delaney in bright yellow, ‘I loved your mother, you know Lulu, so brave’ – Harry and I walked slowly back to his truck, Harry’s feet dragging, hating to leave Rose behind. We got into the cabin, and Harry started the engine, his eyes darting to the rear-vision mirror.
I leant into him from across my seat.
‘There’s no such thing as afar,’ I told him.
*
I did not cry for Rose.
There was so much to do, calls to answer and letters to write, people to thank, dinners to cook and words to find to tell people with the question half-open on their lips that no, it was just an accident.
I waited until they had all left, until there were no more lasagnes left on our doorstep, or letters to answer, or calls to make, and then I went into my mother’s kitchen.
‘Righto, Rose,’ I said out loud, ‘let’s bake our way to goodness.’
I found one of Rose’s exercise books on the shelf and opened it on the bench in front of me. Basic Butter Cake in Rose’s big childish writing – perfect, I wasn’t about to attempt anything complicated.
Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees.
Cream 250 g butter, 1 cup caster sugar, 2 teaspoons vanilla essence in bowl.
Add three eggs – one at a time – with two and half cups S.R flour and 2/3 cup milk, pour in slowly.
I began to add the ingredients in, hearing Rose’s voice in my ear, and feeling her hand slide over mine holding the wooden spoon.
‘Don’t beat it to death, now,’ she said.
I remembered at the last minute to throw in some sultanas. ‘Don’t skimp, Lulu,’ I heard her say, so I threw in another handful, and poured the mixture into one of the battered, old tins she had always refused to throw out. I laughed a little, remembering Harry trying to sell her the idea of buying a new set of baking tins. ‘They’ve got Teflon ones now, Rosey-girl,’ he’d said, ‘nothing sticks to them.’ Rose had looked up at him from the table where she had been rolling out pie-crust pastry. ‘What’s the point of that?’ she’d smiled at him.
I put the cake in the oven, then sat down at my mother’s table and waited for it to rise. Then, when it was done, when I had pushed the skewer in and it had come out clean, just as she had taught me, and the kitchen was filled with the sweet aroma of Rose’s last cake, I took it out, and turned it onto a cake rack, taking care not to break it.
I sat back and considered it.
Then I cried for my mother.
*
‘Lulu.’
I looked up to the kitchen
doorway, startled to see Annie Andrews standing there.
‘Lulu,’ she said again, Annie’s voice so quiet, Annie herself so still that I had not heard her knock, not one jangled hint of her necklaces and bangles.
‘I’ve brought you something,’ she said, walking over to place a book in my hands.
I stared at it, knowing it instantly, knowing the last time I had touched it I had placed it high in a tree house for her daughter’s hands to find.
Annabelle had, Annie told me, kept it with her all those years, taking it with her wherever she and Josh travelled, wrapping it in plastic in places where the humidity could eat away at it, packing it in her carry-on luggage at airports, once, Annie said, having a stand-up screaming fight with an official in Thailand who’d said the made-up words were obviously some sort of code and tried to confiscate it.
Now she had sent it back to me.
‘It arrived today, Lulu,’ Annie said. ‘I came to bring it to you. Annabelle says it’s very important you have it.’
She leant down and kissed me, enveloping me in sandalwood, and placed the book on my lap, where a striped bookmark held the page Annabelle meant for me to open.
‘I’ll let myself out,’ Annie was saying. ‘I’m staying at the old house – at Frank’s – if you need me.’
I heard the click of the front gate, and Annie’s car start up in the street, taking her back to her own past as I stared at my own.
Opening the book at the page Annabelle had marked, I saw my own hand, big, flowery letters.
Emergensis: I had written emergency/crisis – A situation so dire-bolical, either party must attend forthwith.
Beside it, Annabelle had written in her own loopy hand, On my way.
Annabelle.
On her way.
I saw their shadows through the stained glass of the front door.
Josh and Annabelle.
I hadn’t expected them both, Annabelle had written, On my way, not On our way, but as I came down the stairs to open the door, I knew it was right the three of us should do this together.
Say goodbye.
To Rose, of course, but also to those initials engraved beneath her dining room table, entwined around each other for far too long.
‘Tallulah,’ Annabelle said when I opened the door, ‘we’re so sorry about Rose’, and I half-stepped, half-fell into her arms.
Then Josh’s arms circled around both of us, and as strange as it undoubtedly was, it didn’t feel strange at all.
‘Is it too early to say “just like old times”?’ he asked.
‘Josh,’ Annabelle said, breaking away from his embrace. ‘I cannot believe you would say that right now – I’m really sorry, Tallulah, he’s an idiot.’
But I was laughing, probably more than a little hysterical at seeing them, at Josh saying the one thing that hovered in the air between us, at Rose dying, at Duncan dying, of moving all the way to an island to get away from my own reflection, at all the things that had happened to us since we spread our towels out under the same summer sky.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, biting my lip, ‘I don’t know why I’m laughing, it’s not funny.’
Annabelle looked at me with her cat-green eyes.
‘Well, maybe it’s a little bit funny,’ she smiled. ‘You know, in an absopletely inappropriate way.’
I smiled back at her, and thought there was still no other person in the world who understood me like Annabelle Andrews did.
We went inside to sit and drink tea at Rose’s dining table – Josh and Annabelle, I was pleased to see, holding hands across it.
We spoke for a long time about Rose, her cakes and her dresses, her Sunday roasts – ‘Legendary,’ Josh sighed – and how much, despite her unconventionality, or maybe because of it, we had all loved her.
‘She was great,’ Annabelle said.
‘The best,’ said Josh, and in the silence that followed I thought about what my mother would want me to say, right at that moment.
Rip the band-aid off, Lulu.
‘I’m sorry Annabelle,’ I said, and the words I had practised so many times came out naturally, as if it was the first time I had ever uttered them, maybe because I was finally saying them to the person they were meant for. ‘I am truly sorry for what I did to you on your wedding day. I have spent every day since hating myself for it, and I would do anything to take it back.’
‘So would I,’ Annabelle answered steadily, ‘but you’re not the only one who should apologise. I did the exact same thing, and I could say that we were just kids and that it didn’t matter as much, but it did.’ She met my eyes and held them. ‘I know it did, Tallulah.’
I began to cry, her words releasing me, finally, from the girl by the river.
Josh stood up, and put his hands on the back of his chair, rocking it back and forth.
‘Well, obviously the person here who should really be doing the apologising is me,’ he began, ‘I’m a . . .’ He stopped rocking, searching for the words.
‘Dickhead?’ offered Annabelle, as Josh ploughed on.
‘I’m a, well, I’m what you might call a crack slipper,’ he said finally, while I stared at him, incredulous. ‘There’s some people,’ he continued, ‘who sort of go through life always looking for a place to park their bike and when they find it, they feel, well, amazed really, that someone has let them park it, you see.’
‘Josh,’ Annabelle interrupted, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
But I did, the ghost of Duncan McAllister hovering in Rose’s kitchen.
‘It’s all right, Josh,’ I said. ‘More tea, vicar?’
Later, when they had gone home to the River House, I lay in bed and thought about the three of us. ‘The bemusement triangle,’ Annabelle had said when the tea had been replaced by wine and the tears – mostly Josh’s, still going on about his pushbike – by laughter.
People, I thought, would be bemused by us.
‘How could she?’ they would say of Annabelle, staying married to Josh, of me, the Juniper Bay Wedding Shagger, and of the three of us, somehow muddling through that night as the sky grew lighter to emerge, once more, as friends.
But some people, people who had a big, first love would understand – and I’d had two. They had both been my first loves, and that night I let them go, finally realising that your first love, no matter how big it may have been, wasn’t necessarily your true one.
*
‘Lulu,’ Will called, from the front step, ‘I’m here.’
I ran down the stairs to the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, opening it, ‘the buzzer’s broken.’
I’d rung him the day after Annabelle and Josh’s visit, and asked him to Juniper, to talk about the plans for the B and B, but really to talk about my plans for him, which mostly hopefully involved me.
We stood grinning at each other, with Barney going stark raving mad between us.
‘As you can see he’s missed you,’ I told Will Barton, gorgeous, lovely and finally here, Will Barton, smiling his lazy man smile at me. ‘I have too,’ I told him, then just in case I hadn’t made myself clear, I added, ‘a lot.’
‘Is that right?’ he said, as we went inside.
‘Would you like a drink? Harry’s left you some beer in the fridge,’ I said. ‘You must be thirsty after the trip, it’s hot, isn’t it?’ I babbled, thrown by Will, suddenly seeming so tall, so ‘islandy ’, in my childhood house.
‘It is hot,’ Will agreed, still smiling, ‘and I’d love a beer, Lulu.’
We went down to the garden, to sit on the swing, while Will filled me in about the WIASA, and the now postponed opening plans for it.
‘It’s all ready to go, Lulu,’ he told me, ‘Julia’s rung all the bookings and told everyone we’ll let them know when you’re coming back.’
I
nodded, thinking I really would spontaneously combust if he didn’t stop talking, and kiss me.
‘Are you coming back, Tallulah?’ he asked, staring straight ahead.
He was, I realised, nervous, unsure of what I was going to do, what I had planned for the WIASA, of me.
Who could blame him? I had spent half my time on Willow dodging him.
‘I’m definitely coming back,’ I told, ‘and I want to run Barney’s with you.’
‘As your Water Sports Director?’
‘Something like that.’ I stood up and took his hand, leading him to my room, diving in.
*
Later that afternoon, I lay with my head tucked under his arm, and he turned his head to smile at me.
‘Thank goodness for that,’ he said. ‘I was sick of treading water.’
‘You have no idea,’ I told him.
They were moving like mercury through the shadows, silvery silhouettes forming and reforming in clusters under the branches.
In the half-light, I began to make out their faces, the gang, as Duncan would say, all here.
Annie and Frank, Fergus, Christa, Josh and Annabelle, Simone, Stella, Billy, Mattie, Sam, even Ben, with Monica Golliana tucked under his arm.
‘I hope it’s all right that I am joining in,’ she said when she met me, and I liked her instantly, even if she did look unnecessarily pretty for this time of the morning.
The Willowers were there too, Julia and Boris, Will trying to keep control of Barney, who was giddy with the heady collision of old and new smells.
Annie had said we had to get there before the bulldozers did – ‘to take the bastards by surprise’– and so there we all were, wearing the shocked, wan expressions of the half-asleep.
‘I may be a drunk, old hippy,’ Annie had said at one of the meetings she had called at the River House, ‘but if it’s one thing we drunk old hippies know how to do, it’s how to stage a protest, so listen and learn, people, particularly you, Lulu, no wetting your pants when the policemen come.’
I watched as Maxine Mathers picked her way with a camera crew down the path, and felt Simone bristle beside me.
Walking on Trampolines Page 30