by Fiona Lowe
‘Adam and Liane Doherty have just bought Clearwater out on the old Mingunyah Track. Where the Dohertys go, the McKenzies follow. When Ricky Taranto and Sunny Chen got wind of their interest, both asked me about listings in the district. Believe me, once those two stake a claim in the valley, the floodgates will open. Soon anyone worth knowing will have a place there. It’s the perfect time to go out on my own.’
His confidence rattled her deep-seated need for security, but the reality was, her security was tied unalterably to Cameron. He’d plucked her from a grimy and vulnerable lifestyle, showered her with love and surrounded her with the sort of financial comfort she’d only ever dreamed about. Although his comfort level with debt was greater than hers, she trusted him implicitly. ‘If you think it’s the best way forward …’
‘Hell yes!’ He slapped his thigh. ‘Mingunyah’s finally taking off and we need to be part of it. Look at Alex and Sarah. They’re raking it in. That fucking cheese of theirs is a licence to print money. Even their sourdough bread that was just something they did for cheese tastings has its own identity. Christ! It’s on the menu of every restaurant and café within two hundred K.’ He drained his shiraz. ‘We deserve this opportunity, baby girl. We’re owed it.’
So they’d moved to Mingunyah. It had thrown her life into disarray for months.
Margaret was ecstatic to have Cameron close again. The little girls transitioned to Mingunyah Primary without a skipping a beat and the big girls loved boarding at St Cuthbert’s. As the parents of boarders, Cameron and Anita met a lot of expat and international parents at school functions. Apparently, Australians living in the crowded cities of Asia waxed lyrical about their homeland’s wide open spaces and Asians wanted to diversify their investments. Both groups had the disposable income to buy a plot of eucalyptus-scented paradise. As Cameron kept saying, ‘It’s win-win, baby girl.’
Not quite. Anita missed her elder daughters more then she let on and she pined for her lost in-home cooking business.
The unexpected treat of the move was her closer friendship with Sarah. Her sister-in-law went out of her way to introduce Anita to people as well as welcoming her into her book group. It was an eclectic group of strong-minded women and more than once, Anita had felt out of her depth intellectually and spiritually. She was, however, always the best dressed. That was something she didn’t understand about Sarah. If Cameron was to be believed, and Anita had no reason to doubt him, Sarah and Alex were falling off their wallets, yet Sarah often looked as if she was wearing her gardening clothes. If Anita had Sarah’s disposable income, she’d never bargain hunt for designer clothes and shoes again.
The phone rang. ‘The girls!’ She almost upended the breakfast tray in her eagerness to answer it.
‘I doubt it,’ Cameron said. ‘They always call on your mobile.’
‘Hello,’ she said breathlessly, ignoring her husband’s authoritative tone.
‘Oh. It’s you.’ Margaret’s haughty disappointment hit like a bucket of icy water.
‘Happy Mother’s Day, Margaret,’ Anita said with forced brightness, remembering the cello and the anticipated saddle.
‘I want to talk to Cameron.’
And happy Mother’s Day to you too, Anita. ‘Of course. I’ll pass you over.’ She thrust the phone at Cameron and whispered, ‘Your mother.’
‘Mum,’ Cameron said jovially. ‘I was just about to ring you. Happy Mother’s Day.’
As Anita took a sip of her coffee and tried not to wince at the bitter taste, she watched Cameron frown. She wondered what Margaret was saying.
‘Surely Sarah—’ He lifted the phone from his ear and Anita heard her mother-in-law’s usually well-modulated voice hit an unintelligible screech. ‘I can hear you’re upset, Mum. Yes, Sarah should have—’ He sighed. ‘I understand. Yes, of course. No, it’s no problem.’ He pressed the off button and threw the handset onto the bed. ‘Shit.’
‘What?’
‘Mum reckons her car’s been stolen.’
‘God. That’s awful.’
‘Yeah. And apparently, Sarah wasn’t very sympathetic. Now Mum’s in a state.’
‘To be fair, Sarah’s hosting lunch,’ Anita said, setting aside the tray and throwing back the covers.
‘Yeah, well it means I have to go over and sort out the mess. Hell, it will probably take all morning and I’d planned to—’ He threw her a doleful look. ‘Sorry. I won’t have time to clean up the kitchen. The girls will help.’
If he was suggesting their five-and seven-year-old daughters help, then she knew the kitchen was a disaster. ‘There’s pancake batter on the floor, isn’t there?’
He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. ‘Love you.’
Oh yeah. Happy Mother’s Day, Anita.
* * *
Ellie breathed a sigh of relief as the car thudded over the first cattle grid, heralding their arrival at Riverbend. The car was making a knocking noise and despite a lack of flashing warning lights, she wasn’t totally convinced the engine wouldn’t suddenly seize. Today was not the day to break down, not that any day was good for that sort of inconvenience. But Sarah was still pissy with her for not coming to their mother’s birthday two months ago and, going by the regular reminder texts her elder sister had started sending at noon the day before, not even death was an acceptable excuse for missing this year’s Mother’s Day lunch.
You know how Mum loves it when we’re all under the same roof.
When that text arrived, Ellie was very tempted to type back, Does she though? But she didn’t want to have that particular conversation so she went with the less controversial, I’ll try to be there.
Sarah’s reply had been instantaneous. Noah always enjoys being with his cousins.
Ellie had nothing she could use to dispute that. Noah adored his older cousins with the sort of hero worship narcissists dreamed about and he loved playing with Ava and Chloe. The problem for Ellie was that no matter how great Noah’s enjoyment, it wasn’t enough to offset the discomfort she experienced whenever she was in the bosom of her family. Like a bad case of hives, there was little she could do to reduce her reaction to her mother and siblings, so, in the way of anyone with allergic tendencies, she avoided the irritants as much as possible. When she had no choice but to be in the presence of her family, she used alcohol instead of antihistamines.
With Cameron’s return to Mingunyah, the family-gathering goal posts seemed to have shifted. Over the last year, invitations had increased exponentially, which put her in a tricky situation. After all, there were only so many excuses a girl could use to refuse to attend.
‘Yay!’ Noah cheered from the back seat as the thud-thud-thud of tyres on iron bars stopped and the crunch of rubber on gravel took its place. ‘We’re here. That took forever.’
‘Hardly,’ Ellie said, smiling at him through the rear-view mirror. But then again, her seven-year-old found sitting still a challenge. His little body constantly vibrated with energy, wriggling and writhing in anticipation, and his tight black curls—so at odds with his almond-shaped eyes—bounced wildly. She wished her enthusiasm for the day was a tenth of his.
In the years before Noah, when she was living and working in Thailand, the Land of Smiles offered up the perfect excuse for her not to attend family functions: distance. Ellie held fond memories of that time and they weren’t restricted to living in a tropical climate among a mostly Buddhist population. Ellie wasn’t naive enough to believe that anything stays the same forever and she was intimate with the fact that life changed whether you wanted it to or not. And eight years ago, her pregnancy had raised more than one dilemma for her. Although living away from Australia gave her freedom from family, she wasn’t a natural risk-taker and it made sense to err on the side of caution. So she’d returned to Australia to give birth in a midwife-run birth centre with a world-class hospital across the hall. It had seemed a safer bet than having a baby in rural Thailand, close to the border with Myanmar.
She and Noah settle
d in Sydney, although that decision had little to do with the magnificent harbour or the pulsing nightlife, and more to do with it being the first city the plane touched on Australian soil. That and it wasn’t Victoria. Sydney, however, had proved to be an expensive city for a single woman with a child and despite sharing the cost of housing with others, Ellie reached a point where she could no longer ignore the fact her bank balance spent more time going backwards than forward. Being unable to afford all the things the city offered those with a medium to large disposable income threw up the stark and unrelenting question: what’s the point of living here?
The year before Noah commenced school, Ellie started looking for a job in rural New South Wales. The limited choice of jobs quickly dictated she widen her search and, still determined to avoid Victoria, she’d looked at South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia. As she’d scrolled past an advertisement with a logo of a house sketched with a heart in the place of a window, eleven words snagged her gaze: Valley View Neighbourhood House seeks mentor for recently arrived Burmese community.
Surely it was a different Valley View from the town thirty minutes down the road from Mingunyah? The two towns were so similar they were hard to tell apart, but it was unwise to mention that to a local. Mingunyah deplored Valley View for its underhand tactics in securing the shire offices a hundred and fifty years ago and Valley View hated that the only high school in the district was in Mingunyah. The rivalry always spilled over at the footy, where blood was invariably shed on the oval and then again post match, when girlfriends and wives were seduced by opposing sides.
When Ellie was growing up, one of the most cosmopolitan things in a mainly Anglo Saxon town was the espresso machine Gino Cilauro’s grandfather had imported in 1965 for the then equally eccentric and worryingly foreign pizza-pie shop. By the time Ellie was thirteen and spending school-holiday nights at Tony’s, they’d dropped ‘pie’ from the name but there was still a hint of the word in the shadow on the old sign. The second cosmopolitan thing to hit town was the black-market trade of homemade dips Con Papadopoulos sold from his greengrocer’s shop. Not many of the meat-and-potato-trained palates welcomed the eggplant, yoghurt and garlic combinations but she’d adored the strong flavours scooped onto pita bread. Her mother had been less enthusiastic: ‘No boy is ever going to kiss you after eating that!’
Ellie had thought this a good thing and enthusiastically shovelled more dip into her mouth.
On closer reading of the job advertisement, it became clear the town was her Valley View. Her mind boggled that Burmese refugees now lived there.
If her pregnancy had been a fork in the road of her life, so was this job. When she combined her experience in Thailand with growing up in Mingunyah, the position was tailor-made for her. There was just one significant drawback—Valley View’s proximity to Mingunyah. Ellie had tried to walk away from the siren call of the job, but it became impossible. The scope of it was something she could sink her teeth into and really make a difference. She applied, rationalising that it was pointless to worry about being so close to Mingunyah when her application may not even be considered. The board offered her the job at the end of a video-link interview.
After a sleepless night and as the early dawn light splashed against a hazy city sky, she conceded that staying away from Mingunyah was in her and Noah’s worst interests. So they moved into a share house on the eastern edge of Valley View, primarily because Mingunyah lay to the west. A day after she unpacked the last box, she telephoned her mother.
‘I suppose you think you can just move back into your old room.’
Not even if I was destitute. ‘We’re living in the old Guthrie place on the outskirts of Valley View.’
‘Why on earth do you have to live in a commune?’
Ellie chose to laugh; it was that or say something that would inevitably cause Sarah to telephone and berate her.
‘Actually, Mum, it’s more of a collective.’ Really, it was just four women sharing a rambling old weatherboard farmhouse. Wendy, a yoga instructor and home healthcare worker, liked to decorate the front veranda with Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags to detract from the peeling paintwork. Rachel, the high school art teacher, extended her art to include the hanging of thirty teapots from the branches of the fragrant peppercorn tree by the gate; it meant visitors found the house far more easily than peering for the RMB number. Grace, whose paid job was in town planning at the shire offices, worked hard at resurrecting the old orchard, coaxing cherries, apples, quinces and almonds from the lichen-covered trees, as well as planting an enormous vegetable garden. She’d knocked together a stall out of old crates and palings and sold produce at the farm gate, mostly on an honesty system. Noah and Wendy’s daughter, Bree, loved helping Grace in the garden. They also manned the stall on the weekends until they got bored, which was generally after about fifteen minutes. Ellie ran chooks and her border collie, Splotch, rounded them up, along with the two sheep that kept the grass under control.
It was hard to believe two years had passed since they’d moved in.
Ellie swivelled in the driver’s seat and faced her son. ‘You ready to open some gates for me?’
‘Yeah! Gus showed me how.’ Noah unbuckled his seat belt. ‘I have to close them too, Mum. Uncle Alex will go mental if the goats escape.’
He sounded just like his cousin and Ellie thought of her brotherin-law. Alex wasn’t really the type to ‘go mental’ but then again, she’d never let any of his prize stock wander onto the highway. It sounded like Gus may have and, as a result, learned that his usually reasonable father had his limits—limits that stretched a lot further than his mother’s.
Noah’s hand reached for the door handle.
‘Sit!’ she yelled and Splotch, who was sitting quietly on the seat, gave her a doleful look. ‘You know the rules. You stay sitting until the car stops. Then you can open the door.’
‘Yeah. But, it’s almost stopped.’
‘And if you fall out you’ll be stopped forever,’ she said, trying not to shudder. ‘If you want to open and shut the gates, you follow the rules. Otherwise you’ll be inside the car watching me do it.’
Noah grimaced as if he wanted to argue the unfairness of the conditions but he sat back. She stopped the car a few metres from the gate and pulled on the handbrake.
‘Now, Mum? Please.’
She glanced down the track, saw a plume of dust and a vehicle barrelling towards them. ‘Okay, but don’t open it until the other car’s stopped.’
Noah was out the door in an instant, his running feet somewhat impeded by the slurping grip of muddy ground. He climbed onto the gate and gave her a wave while he waited.
A slither of guilt wound through her. Noah loved Riverbend and often asked to visit, but as much as Ellie wanted to acquiesce, she could never fully shake off the feeling that Sarah felt awkward and uncomfortable in her presence. Every time Ellie convinced herself she was imagining it, Sarah said or did something ambiguous that brought the feeling rushing back. Ellie had no such confusion with Cameron—he openly disapproved of her and her life choices. So much for the theory that the youngest child was always indulged, never judged and always forgiven by fond elder siblings. Then again, the Jamieson family had always done things differently.
As the on-coming vehicle came closer, she made out two distinctive white cylinders extending over the roof of the cab. Tradie’s ute. Surprise tangled with the financial implications. Calling out a tradie on a Sunday wasn’t going to be cheap. Ellie wondered what had happened to precipitate it.
The vehicle slowed then stopped and Noah waved enthusiastically at the driver.
A broad-shouldered man of medium height got out of the ute, his hat casting a shadow over his features. The constant low buzz of anxiety that lived inside Ellie—the high-alert warning that was all about Noah’s safety—kicked up a notch. She pushed open the door, swung her boot-clad feet onto the damp track and strode for the gate.
‘G’day, mate.’ She heard t
he driver’s voice before she reached Noah. ‘Do you need a hand?’
‘I can do it,’ Noah called out. ‘I know how.’
‘Good on ya.’ The tone was laconic and wry. ‘I could have done with your help a couple of hours ago.’
‘I’ll close it too,’ Noah added proudly. Her son was generally keen to help but just lately she’d noticed he was particularly eager to help men.
Ellie reached the gate and gripped the top turn, positioning herself between Noah and the unknown man. Keeping her head down, she kept walking, taking the gate with her.
‘Mum!’ Noah’s furious objection laced the word. ‘You said you’d stay in the car.’
Glancing around, she eyed a grassy tussock with deep grooves created by the pressure of the bottom of the gate. She kicked it. ‘I thought it might get stuck on this.’
Noah shot her a sceptical look as the tradie said, ‘Eleanor?’
The surprise and pleasure in the man’s voice stilled her. Noah took the chance to gleefully push the gate to the full extent of its hinges.
The man wore filthy jeans and a navy blue polar fleece that featured an embroidered logo on the left side of his chest. It was a clever design of two similar shapes—the right side was an orange flame and the left a blue water droplet—and was ringed by the words, ‘Mingunyah Plumbing Heating & Cooling Specialists’. As Ellie stared at him blankly, he pulled off his battered hat. Muddy blond hair that badly needed a cut fell across a high forehead and dark lashes ringed bright blue eyes that squinted into the noon sun. Eyes that were studying her.
Sweat pooled under her arms as he scrutinised her. It had been a long time since a man had looked at her like that, which was exactly how she liked it. The urge to grab Noah’s hand and run back to the car engulfed her as fast as the flames of a bushfire.