by Wendy James
Karen blushed. “Of course not, Honor. I didn’t think you—I was just thinking how lovely you look.”
“Of course you were. I was only joking.” The woman bent and kissed her on the cheek. “You look lovely, too.” She turned to me and held out her hand. “And you must be the famous Gypsy. I’m Honor Fielding—I live across the road from you, I believe.” She beckoned to the man, who was talking to someone at an adjacent table. “Chip, come and meet the woman who bought your old house. I think we need to reassure her that we’re decent citizens. Kaz has been telling her stories.”
The man looked over, raised his eyebrows coolly, and went back to his conversation.
Honor rolled her eyes. “He’s a rude bastard. I’ll introduce you later.”
Karen, her color still high, left the table, excusing herself with a murmur.
Honor pulled out the empty chair on the other side of me and sat down. “You don’t mind if I sit here, do you?” I shook my head. “I haven’t been here for two minutes, and I’ve already pissed Karen off. I think that’s some sort of record. She was always taking offense at school, too. And somehow I always forget that she hates being called Kaz these days.” She gave a deep sigh. “I don’t know why I say yes to these things—everyone’s just as hung up as they were thirty years ago. It’s as if I never left.” She sighed again. “And tonight is going to be a debacle. I might be completely trivial, but I’m utter crap at trivia. I offered to make a donation, a big one, instead, but Tom can be very persuasive.” She looked around the room despondently. “Oh God. This is going to be a long, long night. I don’t know about you, but I need a drink.”
It was a long night, requiring many drinks. It turned out that Honor wasn’t utterly crap at trivia, which on this occasion revolved around sport, local history, and local sporting history. In fact, she was something of a whiz. The other members of the table, including a surprisingly competitive Karen, were equally well informed and—with negligible assistance from me—managed to win most of the major prizes, including the signed photograph.
In between questions, Honor and I conducted a whispered conversation, lurching randomly from local gossip to personal confidences in the way that drunken conversations tend to.
“So, are you over it yet?” she’d asked.
“Am I over being the only person at the table who doesn’t have a clue what the hell the Green Cup is, let alone who won it in 1985? I honestly don’t understand how you people remember this stuff. Or why.”
“Ha. No, I meant are you over teaching drama to a bunch of kids who can’t see the point. Country life. Being stuck out of town.”
“Oh. All that.”
“Yes.” Her eyes were brimming with mischief. “It can’t be your most exciting gig.”
“I haven’t been here long enough to be over it. And as far as gigs go, I’ve had worse.”
“Truly?”
“I once did a margarine commercial where I had to butter a slice of bread about two hundred times before we got the take right.”
I refilled our glasses, noting Karen’s quickly masked look of disapproval. Honor took a long sip, moved closer, lowered her voice even further. “Just so you know: the Green Cup was a yearly sporting competition between Enfield Wash and Chester High, and 1985 was the year the students secretly added a ‘hookup’ tally—although I don’t think that was the term we used. The Wash flogged Chester—and our girl Kaz was the overall winner. It’s not something any of us will ever forget.”
Back when I was acting, I’d known plenty of women like Honor in an official capacity—talent agents, publicists, producers—but for reasons I couldn’t put my finger on, those relationships never seemed to go beyond the professional. Even though we were all basically engaged in the same business, there was a huge gulf between the two sides. When I first started out, I’d assumed people like Honor were bit players in the spectacle that was celebrity life. But as time went on, and I witnessed the way the wheel of fortune seemed to turn more quickly and dramatically for those in the limelight while the people like Honor not only survived, but thrived, I realized the converse was actually true. Now, at such a distance in time and place, there was a peculiar pleasure in talking to someone like Honor, someone who understood the world I’d once belonged to, who had some insight into who I’d been, if only for a short while, all those years ago.
By the end of the night, it felt as if we knew both everything and nothing about one another. And by the end of the night, I couldn’t resist.
“So is there a story to tell? About you and Chip Gascoyne?”
“Oh.” She laughed. “Only ancient history. We went out a couple of times when we were kids. Actually, I think it’s possible that Chip Gascoyne has a ‘story’ with practically every female in the room.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure I don’t have any sort of story with Karen.” The subject of our gossip was standing right behind us.
I was sober enough to be embarrassed, but Honor didn’t even blink. “Only because she’s some sort of cousin.”
“That’s no impediment. So is Sarah Newman.”
“Sarah? Oh my God. You didn’t?”
“We did.” And then to me: “I think we may have exchanged contracts, but I’ve been away a bit, and I don’t think we’ve met. It’s Suzannah, isn’t it?” He held out his hand. “Chip Gascoyne.”
“Hi. Yes, I’m Suzannah.”
He clasped my hand hard, regarding me critically. “You don’t look—”
I interrupted, impatient. “I know, I don’t really look like I do in the photo. It’s already been pointed out. What can I say? It was taken almost twenty years ago.”
He laughed. “I was actually going to say that you don’t look sober enough to drive. And you’re pissed as a newt, Fielding. How about I drive you both home? Pretty sure you’re going my way.”
The following day I was in the kitchen garden, planting seedlings. I’d come to love the dirty work of gardening—these days it was practically my only physical activity. Where once I would have gone for a run in the early evening or visited the gym after work, being responsible for Mary had made anything more time-consuming than the occasional quick jog around the perimeter fence difficult. When we’d first moved in, I’d decided that while the front garden was too daunting for anything but mowing, I’d have a go at resurrecting the old kitchen garden. I’d also imagined that growing veggies could provide some sort of occupational therapy for Mary, get her out of the house, give her an interest, but she’d looked at me as if I were mad. Gardening is for the elderly, she’d said dismissively.
I’d already had some success. My initial efforts had produced more pumpkin and zucchini than two people could ever eat, and I’d been inspired to plant more. I took a taxi into town to pick up my car and, despite my hangover, called the local nursery and bought seedlings: lettuce, spinach, broccoli, beans.
No doubt there were other things someone with even a smattering of gardening knowledge would have known to do as preparation, but I was blissfully ignorant. My modus operandi involved simply pulling out everything that had previously taken root, whether weed or not, turning the soil in the established beds, then pushing the little sprouts in, patting the dirt around them, adding water.
I was digging in the bean seedlings when a deep voice asked dryly, “You do know beans need something to climb up, don’t you? They’re a vine.”
It was Chip Gascoyne. He looked like a picture-book Aussie farmer—the tanned sinewy forearms, untucked checked shirt, riding boots, jeans, Akubra tilted back on his head.
“I thought I’d come and check that you’d survived the trivia night. And see whether you needed a lift into town to pick up your car. But it looks like you’ve already got that sorted.”
“I didn’t actually drink that much.”
He raised his eyebrows. “So you can remember what you said to me when I dropped you off?”
I tried to remember the possible indiscretion but came up blank. “You dropped
me off?” The joke was lame, but he grinned anyway. “So what embarrassing thing did I say?”
“It’s okay. You only said thank you. Or maybe thanks. You did better than Honor, though.”
“Oh?”
“I had to practically carry her inside. Lucky I know where she hides her front door key. You’re clearly in good shape today. You could probably do with a shower, though.”
I looked down—my knees and fingers were black, and there were smudges of dirt on my legs, my shirt, and no doubt on my face, too.
Chip was looking around at the garden beds. “It’s good to see this all coming alive again.”
“Well, I hope it all actually stays alive. I’m completely clueless, really. Do the beans really need something to grow up?”
“I think so. Though I’m not really much of a gardener either. You’ll probably get a better crop than we ever did. Mum was good with flowers, but her kitchen garden wasn’t ever much chop. The only thing that ever grew was pumpkin, and they weren’t those sweet Kent ones you get at the supermarkets now. They were those old-man blues. Jesus Christ—every year we all prayed for Mum’s pumpkins to fail. She insisted on us eating every single one, which meant we had pumpkin in some shape or form for months. And to be honest, there aren’t that many shapes or forms. I think we maybe got a few weeks’ reprieve.”
I went to tell him about my own success with pumpkins but was interrupted by the slam of the screen and Mary’s ringing tones. “Well, what have we got here? If it isn’t Farmer Jones.”
Mary had her hair in two long, messy braids, with a few gray feathers (from a pillow, a feather duster?) poked in the ends. She was wearing a long, floaty stretch-cotton skirt—hers—and a loose but low-cut raw cheesecloth top, a relic from my misspent youth. Her feet were bare and almost fluorescently pale, her toenails painted badly in an assortment of bright colors, the enamel covering almost as much toe as nail. She had two circles of bright red on her cheeks—my lipstick, no doubt—and her eyes were rimmed with black.
“Mary, this is Chip Gascoyne. We bought the house from him.”
“I know who Chips Rafferty is. My dad always watched that movie whenever it came on—what was it? Something to do with cows and the war; I can remember that. God, it was boring.” She looked over at him suspiciously. “You were younger, though. And you had those terrible sticky-out ears. I always felt embarrassed for you.”
“No, he’s not—”
“Well, I guess we were all a bit younger then, weren’t we?” Chip had slowed down his speech, put on a country drawl. “And I eventually had my ears pinned back.” He took off his hat to give her a better view.
She looked him over critically. “You’re definitely older, but you’re actually better-looking in the flesh.”
“Well, thank you, ma’am.” He offered a sweeping bow.
“I still wouldn’t fuck you, though. Not if you paid me.”
Mary turned and floated back inside, slamming the screen door after her.
I cringed, but Chip was grinning. “Well, that’s me told. Good to know where I stand. Your mother?”
“Yep. My mother.”
“She looks too young to have dementia.”
“It’s a long story.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Maybe you can tell me sometime. I like long stories.”
He called me that afternoon. “Have you seen much of the town?”
“I’ve had a bit of a drive about.” We’d been here for months, and it was embarrassing to admit how little I’d explored. I’d been too busy getting the house sorted, settling into my new job, looking after Mary.
“I take it you can leave your mother for a bit?”
“I can. I just have to prepare food. Hide the matches. Make sure she’s settled.”
“She won’t wander off?”
“I can barely get her to leave the house.”
“I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning, then. About eight. If we get an early start, it won’t be too hot. You can tell me that story.”
I should have been affronted by the fact that he’d left no space for me to disagree, but it felt good to have someone else take charge, make the decisions.
“It sounds like fun.”
“It will be. Oh, and bring your togs.”
“Togs?”
“Cossies. Swimmers. Bathers. Whatever you call them. There are a few spots on the river that’re good for a swim.”
He picked me up as promised, early on Sunday morning, in his battered but surprisingly comfortable ute. He drove us into town first. His driving was far too fast, but somehow it felt safe as well as exhilarating. He was calm, intent, didn’t chat. He was so focused he didn’t notice me watching. I could imagine him in a different time, with his battered Akubra, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He wasn’t quite Chips Rafferty, but there was something quintessentially Australian about him. He was nothing like most of the men I’d known and a long way from being my type.
We stopped for coffee and wood-fired sourdough croissants at a little hipster café that had recently opened in a former garage in the center of town. The café’s industrial-chic aesthetic was identical to its city counterparts’: the walls had been stripped back to expose the raw brick; the cement floor was polished; every beam was exposed. The baristas were tattooed and pierced and friendly. It was noisy, busy, full of life. The coffee was good, the buttery croissants even better.
Chip drove me around the streets of the town, pointing out areas of interest beyond the main tourist route. Initially there didn’t seem much to distinguish it from any other Australian country town. The main street was long and wide, the buildings a hodgepodge of architectural styles, the grand nineteenth-century churches outnumbered by the even grander veranda-wrapped pubs that seemed to have been built on every corner. But Chip managed to bring Enfield Wash to life. He didn’t tell me the history of the town itself, but every place he took me was rendered significant by some story or other—usually funny, and frequently involving females—from his own life. He drove past the nineteenth-century brick primary school, pointing out the classroom where Miss Von Beelan—a certifiable psychopath who’d taken a strong dislike to him on account of some argument she’d had with his mother when they were children—had pulled down his trousers in front of the entire class to spank him with the ruler, and to his shame, Chip hadn’t been wearing underpants. The teacher had been suspended from teaching after his parents complained, but he hadn’t gone back to school anyway. His parents had decided that it was time for boarding school, and he’d been sent away to Sydney the following term.
“Looking back, it might have helped my reputation if they’d let me come back for a bit,” he told me, his voice dry. “The fact that I didn’t come back after the Von Beelan incident made it stick in everyone’s memories. I think I was known as the kid who couldn’t afford undies for years. And it confirmed my old man’s reputation as a lousy bastard, too.”
The Anglican church, a small but imposing Gothic revival building, was the place where he’d first kissed a girl.
“I was doing confirmation classes.”
“Were your parents religious?”
“Not really—I mean, we went to church for Easter and Christmas. But my mother got it into her head that being confirmed was important. I think one of her friends was related to the minister, and they were trying to increase numbers or get recruits. The Cathos were always ahead of us there.”
It was all a long way from my own very suburban upbringing.
“Anyway, I was doing the confirmation classes . . . this was in fifth grade, too, just before the pants incident—”
“A big year.”
“And there was this girl I fancied, Tania Brigstock. She works in the school office. Tania Jones now. You probably know her.”
“I do.”
“She was a couple of years older than me. A stunner. Long blonde hair, tall. She used to walk, and even run, on her toes. She was brilliant at sports—ten
nis, netball, swimming. Anyway, I was smitten. All the boys were smitten. She ended up married to Darren Jones—he was a jockey. You couldn’t meet a nastier, more dishonest little fucker. But Tania, back in the day . . . we were all after her.”
It was impossible to imagine Chip’s version in the Tania I knew, although I had noticed her odd manner of walking.
“Anyway, she was a smart cookie. She knew I liked her and said if I gave her five bucks I could kiss her.”
“And did you?”
“Well, I only had three bucks, so we negotiated. No tongues. I didn’t even know about tongues, so that wasn’t a big deal.”
“Was it worth it?”
“I thought so. We did it there.” He pointed to the hedge between the church and the manse. “You can actually crawl inside that hedge. There’s a sort of hollow. There was back then, anyway.”
“And how was it? The kissing.”
“A little bit too much of a good thing. She offered to let me touch her tits for another five dollars. It took me a month to get the money together. That blew my mind.”
“I can imagine. Isn’t ten a bit young?”
“Way too young. I didn’t go near girls for years.”
I was skeptical. “Not because you were sent away to a boarding school—I’m guessing it was a boys’ school?”
“Well, yeah. That’s true.” He laughed. “But I was definitely traumatized.” We continued through the residential area, driving past the beautiful old brick homes on Parliament Hill. He pulled over in front of the grandest one. It had been built by his mother’s family, the Summervilles, in the late nineteenth century and had still belonged to the family during his childhood. It was a mansion, really, some sort of art nouveau concoction—three stories, gabled and turreted, with long sash windows and generous wrought-iron balconies. I could imagine the black-and-white tiles in the foyer, the cedar paneling, the wide sweep of the staircase. We could just glimpse a tennis court, clay, lined, clearly still used.
“I didn’t really think much about it when I was a kid, how big it was, how rich they were. They were just my grandparents. The money didn’t mean anything. It didn’t make things any better. Actually, what I remember most about that house was the fucking cold. You couldn’t get warm.”