by Lia Weston
‘I’ve got a little girl now, well, she’s not really little, she’s almost seventeen and about a foot taller than me . . .’ As she trailed off, Mr Zucker straightened up to look at her properly. God, what had she done here? She hadn’t set fire to the shop, surely?
‘Evie Bouvier.’
‘I was “Pleasant” for a bit, ha ha.’
Her smile was not returned.
‘Well, you look different, at least,’ he said after a long pause.
‘Mr Zucker, I know I wasn’t the best behaved child.’ Her understatement hung in the air between them, almost visible. ‘But I’m trying to make a fresh start. Whatever I did, I’m sorry.’
‘You can’t remember?’ His voice rose an octave, like a Welshman watching a particularly infuriating rugby game.
‘No. But sorry.’ Evie put her hands behind her back. ‘So sorry. Is there any way I can make it up to you?’
He plonked the three bags in front of her. ‘That’s a start. Now,’ he said, turning to survey the wall of confectionery behind him, ‘I’d say you look like a woman who could do with about fifty bucks’ worth of mixed lollies.’
Evie left the shop with heavy bags, a light wallet and a gobstopper in her cheek.
One down. Many, many more to go.
‘Yoo-hoo!’
Evie turned, and was almost blinded by a pink supernova. When her vision cleared, Joy Piece was speed-walking towards her, resplendent in a pink tracksuit, pink sneakers and pink bejewelled headband. Behind her were five similarly clad ladies. Just the sight of them gave Evie the twitchings of a migraine.
‘How fortuitous to run into you, what a treat, I was going to pop in earlier but I know what a trial moving can be and I’m sure you’ve already been inundated, you know how people are, love the new thing, you must feel like an exhibit in a zoo. I told Teezy to put in a good word for Mary at school, you know how cliquey girls can be. My spies tell me you stopped by the cafe. Awful, isn’t it? I’ve suggested a few teeny changes to Mr Weissmuller, from one small business owner to another, but you know some men, it’s as if you were just a dog barking in the distance.’
Five bejewelled headbands winked behind her as her followers all nodded.
‘Just the other day, Rosemary and I were discussing this, weren’t we, Rosie?’
From the line, a woman with a round face and a haircut not dissimilar to Stephen Fry’s waved at Evie.
‘And I said, why can’t we have a Starbucks? Wi-Fi, muffins, weeklies, I can’t be the only person who doesn’t want to read about sheep crutching while enjoying a mug of chino, can I?’
Her followers all shook their heads.
‘The bakery isn’t much better, just between us I’m sure she gets all of her stuff out of a packet, I tried to give her some tips but she’s not really the proactive type. Same with Mr Weissmuller, I asked him about almond milk and those coffee flavour shots, you know, hazelnut and whatnot, such fun, but he just stared at me,’ – she made a puppet motion with her hand – ‘bark, bark, bark.’
The gobstopper in Evie’s cheek was leaking bubblegum sweetness and preventing her from any communication beyond an interested, ‘Mmm!’ The taste was also clashing horribly with Joy’s floral perfume.
‘Anyway!’ said Joy, finally moving on. ‘We are the Pink Ladies!’ As one, the line turned and Evie beheld the alarming view of six tracksuited derrières bearing the rhinestone words PINK LADY. Sitting down would be hell.
‘We do a daily lap of Sweet Meadow, rain, hail or shine,’ said Joy.
‘Unless it’s really bucketing down,’ said the woman behind her.
‘Or over thirty-five,’ said the woman behind that woman.
‘It’s a bit warm today,’ said Rosie, who was rosy.
‘We did deliberate but then I said, ladies, healthy body, healthy mind, and besides, what’s the worst that can happen?’
Sunburn? Sunstroke? Heart attack? thought Evie. ‘Mmm!’ was all she said. The gobstopper wasn’t getting any smaller. For a horrible moment she wondered if Mr Zucker had given her a ceramic one in revenge. She’d be doomed to sucking it forever, drooling and incoherent.
‘So! We’d be delighted to add another Pinkie to our little group.’ Joy pulled a card out of her purse and ceremoniously handed it to Evie. ‘You just give this to Marie at Fancy Lady over there,’ Joy indicated a clothing shop whose windows featured a large proportion of tracksuits, ‘and she’ll get you sorted out.’
In the window of Fancy Lady, straightening the wig on a mannequin, was a woman in a yellow dress that made her look like a banana Paddle Pop.
‘Mmm!’ said Evie.
Joy’s tracksuit top gave a strident beep. ‘Right! Heart rate’s dropping, better get moving, lovely to catch you. Come on, girls!’
Like a fat pink caterpillar they marched off down the road, rumps winking in the sun.
Evie pocketed the card. It would be a long cold day in hell before she wore a tracksuit in public again.
CHAPTER THREE
Mary slept badly, jolted out of unconsciousness every time the airconditioning clanked. She woke in a sweaty hundred-count straitjacket, her sheets twisted around her, gripped by panic at the unfamiliar room until she remembered where she was. Panic was then superseded by melancholia.
Everything felt unreal, as if she had been transplanted onto a movie set. When her mother had said they were moving to Sweet Meadow, Mary had thought she was joking. She had held on to that hope while she watched Evie’s metamorphosis, stripping her wardrobe of T-shirts and jeans, cutting off her waist-length hair, shedding her skin like a snake. Mary had even held on to that hope while their furniture was loaded into the trailer, and while they drove out of the city and the houses got further and further apart until there were long stretches of nothing at all. The hills were marked with bushfire scars, the twisted trunks throwing charcoaled arms to the sky, and Mary felt that it was her heart writ large on the landscape in ash and soot: send help.
She lay in the wreck of her bed. She missed her father’s coded tap on her door, the one that would wake her up for a stolen breakfast. Stolen breakfasts were their secret. They snuck out of the house at dawn, Gabe wrapping Mary in one of his hoodies if she was cold. The cafe on the corner had a view of the sea. They would eat scrambled eggs, sourdough, mushrooms soft as butter, tomatoes leaking yellow seeds. He would make her drink her coffee without sugar, saying it would teach her to appreciate the flavour. ‘You’ll thank me when you’re older.’ She would protest, of course, it was part of the ritual, but she would have drunk litres for him if he’d asked. Stolen breakfasts were the only time she had her father to herself.
Now, however, he had ruined everything.
Evie had told her that the divorce was a mutual decision. Grandma, however, told her about the other woman; Mary did not miss the satisfaction in her eyes, like a long-held bet had finally paid off. Perhaps that was what had killed her so soon afterwards; she was just hanging on to be proven right.
Mary could not stop wondering if the other woman had a family, if there were kids that her dad liked to spend time with more than her. His image permanently drifted, sharp and bright, colour-washed with a strange new jealousy, on the edge of her mind.
She tipped herself out of bed and went to the window seat. Yesterday she had lined up the spines of her books in alphabetical order, and that had pretty much been the extent of her unpacking. Mary knelt on the cushions and stared down into the mess of a front garden. The thicket of roses hunched like a burnt formation of Roman soldiers. A few tiny green nodules had appeared on the canes due to her buckets of shower water, laboriously lugged down the stairs and meted out with military precision. Evie helped, but always scanned the primrose curtains to make sure no one was watching. This was the new Evie, of course. The old Evie would have rigged up a chute to channel their shower water directly out the bathroom window.
How weird her father would find the new Evie. Then again, the new Evie was basically his fault.
&n
bsp; Evie sat in a fortress of boxes, sorting bakeware to the soundtrack of one of Mary’s favourite bands complaining through the upstairs floorboards.
Her father had built the kitchen cabinets. She touched the jarrah door, which still swung easily into place. Evie had been allowed to help by handing him tools, secretly thrilled at the responsibility, and as long as she stayed very quiet and gave him exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, everything was fine.
The muffin trays clanked into place. Evie ran her finger over their cold, smooth edges. Could Nathan build a cabinet? Was he good with his hands? He had very nice hands. They looked capable of a few things. A familiar thrill lit low in her stomach but was quickly squelched by the idea of actually having a face-to-face conversation with her childhood sweetheart. Their old adventures might not be enough of a glue to stick them together. He remembered the salute, though – that was something. But was it enough? She would have to be captivating, dazzling. He was ridiculously attractive. Then again, so was Gabe, and he had pursued Evie, not the other way around. Yes, said a voice in the back of her head, but that was seventeen years ago. Evie held up a cake tin and squinted at the bottom of it. ‘Fine’ lines, my bejewelled behind. Nobody was fine with lines, unless they were male. It never mattered with men. Men could have forehead ridges like the Grand Canyon at thirty and still be considered God’s gift. It wasn’t fair.
Evie’s mother Thomasina, though never saying anything directly, had glanced on more than one occasion at Evie’s neglected nails and wash-and-wear haircut, as if they alone were the reason Gabe strayed so often and so far. Evie could only imagine her reaction to what Evie had now become. She fingered the trim on her gingham circle skirt. It was as far away from her childhood as she could manifest. The last time Nathan had seen her, she’d been trying to snap her mother’s car key off in the boot – her last futile attempt at preventing their move – before being hauled unceremoniously into the back seat. She couldn’t return to Sweet Meadow the same as before; there was no point. She needed a role model. The great beauties of the 1950s beckoned – women who didn’t have to worry about anything except having a pie in the oven and a gleaming kitchen floor, women who survived on scraps of praise and the mastery of the domestic arts. Sure, they couldn’t own a credit card, drink in a bar or stay employed if they got married, but Evie ignored this inconvenient ideological flaw for now. She would bake and smile and dote upon Mary – admittedly, not hard to do. She would attempt to deserve Nathan, which was a bit trickier. She would stay out of trouble, and show Sweet Meadow that a leopard could change its spots. After all, who could say no to a plate of butterscotch brownies? Besides Thomasina, of course. Evie knew she still wouldn’t meet with her mother’s approval, no matter how many different kinds of salt she scrubbed herself with in the shower.
If Evie thought that her mother’s death meant she was finally released from the feeling of being a constant disappointment, she was wrong. Transcending from life to a memory, Thomasina became omnipotent. In the house, Evie felt her everywhere. She felt guilty that she hadn’t been more upset when Thomasina died. Their relationship had never recovered from Thomasina’s tendency to put her husband before her daughter; maybe Evie should have tried harder to bridge the gap. Adding to this weight was the guilt that they had ended up in Sweet Meadow, to Mary’s obvious distress.
Evie shoved the last of her silicon whisks into the drawer and another row of Belgian cooking chocolate, soft from the heat, into her mouth. Fucking Gabe. It wasn’t Evie’s fault, this whole mess; it was his.
She sat back on her heels, cheeks full, to view the stacks of cake tins, muffin trays, brioche pans and bundt moulds. Enough weaponry to make a pastry castle. Flans for days, jam rolls until hell froze over.
Maybe she should bake Nathan a cake. An ‘I’m back in town’ cake. A ‘my you’ve changed’ cake. A ‘did you know I can do the splits?’ cake. As that playing-card-hat woman had said, food was the way to a man’s heart. And Nathan wouldn’t care if Evie no longer had the thighs of an eighteen-year-old. He was a priest. He wasn’t allowed to judge people on their looks.
Evie closed the cabinets and took the last flattened boxes into the hallway, adding them to the towering piles she hadn’t yet recycled. Would it be bad form to just turn up at the parish cottage? She’d have to visit the traditional way, knock on the front door, rather than her old routine of scaling the back fence. Loitering nearby in the hope of running into him wasn’t going to work; it was hard to hang around a church without looking as if you were casing the joint.
Someone rapped at the front door. Probably another neighbour with another horrible casserole, grapes ready to pop up like submarines next to chunks of leathery beef. She was starting to think it was on purpose.
Evie wiped her hands on her buttercup-yellow blouse before opening the door.
‘Hello, stranger.’ Holding a bunch of daisies, glowing with the unbeatable combination of religious fervour and excellent genes, Nathan beamed at her from the doorstep, even more handsome up close. Evie remembered her unmade-up face. Fu– damn it.
He smelled of sun-dried cotton and something deep and spicy, vaguely citrusy. She couldn’t remember putting deodorant on and surreptitiously tried to sniff her armpit as she hugged him.
‘Wow,’ said Nathan, stepping back and handing her the flowers, ‘you look wonderful.’
Evie was about to playfully punch him in the arm when she remembered that New And Improved Evie did not punch anyone. Instead, she modestly lowered her eyes and quickly glanced at his left hand. No ring. Praise Jesus.
‘Thought I’d do the official welcome-back thing,’ he said, and waggled his fingers like a showman. ‘Welcome back!’ The daylight hit his hair like a halo.
‘Do you do this for every new resident?’ said Evie, trying to master a come-hither stare, which was difficult with the sun glaring off the front fence.
‘No,’ said Nathan.
‘I’m flattered,’ Evie purred.
‘Joy usually beats me to it,’ added Nathan.
‘Oh.’
‘But you’re a special case, of course,’ he said hastily. He’d had a good orthodontist; the tooth she’d chipped with a cricket bat was now intact again. No doubt it wasn’t the work of Mr Schmerz, the ancient dentist who used to stop mid-filling to wander off and show Thomasina something in the garden, leaving Evie in the chair with a mouthful of implements and rapidly diminishing anaesthesia. Mr Schmerz was probably dead by now. Serves him right, thought Evie.
‘You’ve got surfer’s hair,’ she said. ‘You used to be scared of the pool.’
‘Until you threw me in. Twice.’
‘Sorry about that,’ said Evie. ‘And about a lot of other things, I’m sure.’ She remembered the box-strewn hallway and laundry hamper in the kitchen doorway, and hastily shut the front door behind her. ‘How’re your parents?’
‘Mum’s well. She’s in Fallow Halls now, doing the usual retiring thing – lots of gardening and complaining about young people.’ He shook his head, looking at her in wonder. ‘I can’t believe you have a daughter.’
‘I can’t believe you’re a priest. Your dad must be pleased.’
‘He was.’ His eyes flickered. ‘He passed away last year.’
‘Oh!’ No wonder she hadn’t seen Father Reid at Saint Sebastian’s. She also hadn’t realised how much she had counted on him being around, a comforting presence in the background. Evie wanted to ask more, but felt she couldn’t. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Thanks. He was very fond of you.’
‘Despite popular opinion,’ said Evie, unthinkingly pulling the petals off a daisy.
‘I heard about your mum, too,’ said Nathan. ‘My condolences to you and Mary.’ He gently clasped her shoulder. The shell of New Evie dissolved under his gaze. She was back to being eleven years old, raw and uncomfortable with the loss of a parent and the inability to shape her feelings in a way that made sense.
An unexpected pressure rose in her
chest cavity, a dark hand reaching up into her throat. She scrabbled for words to keep it at bay. ‘That’s the thing with thoracic aortic aneurysms – sometimes you don’t see them coming. Mum just turned sixty. The doctor said it was hereditary. At least I know what I’ll die of. That’s lucky.’ She looked down at the boards of the veranda, where ants were scurrying across invisible lines. Lucky ants, never having to deal with grief or infidelity or death. They just got on with it.
‘I’m here any time you need to talk,’ said Nathan.
‘Thank you.’ She studied the denuded daisy’s bald head.
A row of ravens watched them from a nearby telephone pole.
‘So,’ he said, lightening the tone, sitting on the edge of the railing, ‘is Mary a chip off the old Bouvier block?’
‘No, thank Chr– heavens. I know she looks like one of Dracula’s brides, but don’t let the outfits scare you. She’s actually very sweet.’ Evie glanced up towards Mary’s window. ‘She’d kill me for saying that.’
‘Phil thinks you look like Vivien Leigh.’
Evie toyed with the flower stems, not unpleased. ‘My goodness.’ She’d need to find some curtains to sew together.
There was a folder under Nathan’s arm. Evie nodded towards it. ‘Do priests have homework?’
Nathan looked at the folder and grimaced. ‘They have admin. I’m no good with computers. Typing takes me hours.’
‘I can touch-type. I could help you,’ said Evie. ‘I think I owe you a few favours at least. And it would give me something to do while Mary’s at school.’
‘Besides going to the sweet shop and freaking out Mr Zucker,’ said Nathan.
‘You heard about that.’
‘You know what this place is like.’
‘I don’t think Mr Zucker’s forgiven me.’
‘I don’t think he’s forgiven me.’ His laugh was exactly the same, just deeper. ‘Every time I smell liquorice, I think of you.’
‘You remembered my favourite,’ said Evie.
‘I remember lots of things,’ said Nathan. They regarded each other for a moment, and Evie marvelled that her friend with permanently scabbed knees and ears like cauliflower leaves had become this magnificent creature.