Roadside Sisters (15 page)

‘Women are more flexible. I’ve been in the city a long time now. Plenty of possums live quite happily in the city. I’ve learned to adapt.’

As she said this, Annie reflected that when she had first gone to Melbourne—the fabled Big Smoke—at the age of nineteen, everything about it said ‘freedom’. In those early years she’d found it—living in a shared household in Collingwood with an ever-changing roster of arty types, making lentil salads in the Whole Earth Café, singing with Sanctified Soul, travelling to festivals across the state. Then she’d met Cameron. He was working as a barman in Clifton Hill. They were both from the country and negotiating their way around city life. They’d fallen in love, married.

Annie had found them an old house in Brunswick. She had discovered a purpose in stripping the wallpaper and sanding the floorboards and a new job managing a vegetarian restaurant down the road. Meanwhile, Cameron had found himself ‘a new gender identity’ at a gay bar in St Kilda. When that life fell apart, Annie started again in real estate. She bought herself a smart apartment, designer clothes and snappy cars. At thirty-five Annie lifted her head from her desk, ready to find herself another husband. Only it seemed that all the ‘good men’ had been taken. Apparently they’d been won in some matrimonial ballot and she hadn’t bought a ticket. For the past five years—apart from a few doomed short-term relationships—she’d remained depressingly single. Annie felt
like she had been placed in a ‘career woman’ showcase, as if money in the bank and home ownership classified her as a luxury item few men could afford.

What sort of man did Annie want? Not one of those performers or musicians she’d flirted with in her early twenties—wimpy egomaniacs who couldn’t even help her change the tyre on her pushbike. Not a city business type—spivs and spruikers. Poseurs who wore their sunglasses on their heads, their pullovers tied around their shoulders and, she wouldn’t have been surprised, their socks tied around their ankles. Not a bloke from up home—farm boys whose flat-earth view of the world came from the back of a tractor. And definitely not a man with an ‘alternative gender identity’.

With each passing year Annie couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was like a marsupial with its paw caught in a steel trap—she couldn’t go back, yet she was frightened to go forwards and experience even more pain. Annie didn’t say any of this to Nina and Meredith. She was sick of herself and her predicament, and no amount of talking about it was going to help. Instead she sat and listened, finished the bottle of wine as Meredith and Nina talked recipes and home furnishings, and then she showed them the correct way to extinguish the fire. In the way only a farmer’s daughter who’d been a volunteer for the district Country Fire Authority knew how.

That night a powerful owl kept watch over the RoadMaster as it glowed ghostly white in the moonlight. At various times each of the women woke in their bed to hear a deep and resonant
‘hoot-hoot’ and wondered where on earth she could possibly be. How far had she travelled? How had she ended up here?

Annie pushed away her plate of scrambled eggs and duck-and-orange sausage speckled with fragments of carbonised bark. ‘Blagghh! I feel like crap,’ she moaned. She couldn’t face food this morning. Another afternoon and evening of solid drinking had left her feeling fragile.

She lit a cigarette, ignoring Meredith’s dire health warnings, had two puffs and tossed it into the fire. It tasted vile. She was almost forty now, she reminded herself. Time to give away childish things.

At the protesting squawk of camp chairs being folded, Annie winced. Meredith shook her head with shared exasperation. All hopes of a leisurely start had evaporated as soon as Nina had opened her eyes and realised it was Monday. A school day. By 7 am she had the fire blazing and a kettle boiling. By seven thirty she was rapping on aluminium and calling that breakfast was ready. Meredith had peered through the curtains and seen the campsite was still in shadow. The sun hadn’t even crested the hills across the lake. She wished Nina to hell and back. Annie groaned and buried her face in a fallow pillow.

Nina had apparently decided that, if she expended enough frenzied energy here this morning, it would somehow get the boys out the door in school uniform in time to catch the tram at home in East Malvern. The beauty of the morning mist rising majestically from the water didn’t rate a second look, nor did
the crimson rosellas communing in the trees or the rock wallabies foraging in the dewy grass. They were all duly noted. Lovely. Time to move on.

‘Will you tell us, please, what
is
the hurry?’ Meredith pleaded as Nina scraped Annie’s breakfast into the fire and it hissed its disapproval. She and Annie had cold backsides from sitting on the wooden bench, and badly wanted their canvas camp chairs back so they could warm themselves by the fire with their coffee.

Nina didn’t stop to answer, but bent over the picnic table to clear butter, bread and a jar of her home-made raspberry jam. ‘The sooner we get this all packed away, the sooner we can get moving. I’ve looked at the map and we’ve got a fair drive,’ she announced and headed for the van.

‘How many days till we’re in Sydney?’ Annie called after her. Once inside, Nina packed away the breakfast things and then checked her mobile phone. Dead as the proverbial duck. She had to get reception so she could remind Brad that Anton and Marko were going on the school excursion to Canberra tomorrow and run through the checklist of what they needed to pack.

Nina marched back to the picnic table with her road map. ‘It’s sixteen hundred k’s to Sydney, roughly. If we just take it slowly we’ll have two more nights camping on the beach. I thought we’d stop here . . . and here.’ Nina pointed to the map without having any real idea of what was to be found beneath her fingertip. But it was all coastline and the names Bunga Head, Potato Point and Wreck Bay sounded promising enough. After all, who was she?
Captain Frigging Cook?

Meredith, thankfully, didn’t demand any more details. She was up for it, though she would have liked to stay exactly where she was for the whole two weeks. Maybe there was another wily black bream in the reeds waiting to be enticed by a tasty prawn. She could really become addicted to this whole fishing thing. It was a pity that they were driving towards Byron and everything that had to be dealt with there.

‘If we’re going through Sydney, why don’t we stop and have dinner with Corinne?’ suggested Annie.

Corinne! Her name reverberated in the silence as if a rifle had been fired across the lake. Annie turned, half expecting to see a flight of ducks take to the sky.

Meredith dumped her coffee cup on the splintery table. ‘We are NOT going to see that tart.’

Annie was surprised at Meredith’s vehemence. ‘Oh, come on, it’d be fun. Even more of a reunion,’ she cajoled.

‘It could be the chance of a lifetime,’ added Nina, who was thinking that their chances of getting Corinne to come to dinner were probably nil, but that she’d love to hear her dish the gossip on the people she read about in the glossy magazines.

‘Are you forgetting how she double-crossed us?’ Meredith stared at them both.

‘That was twenty years ago!’ exclaimed Annie. ‘Time to move on, don’t you think?’

‘Yes, well, she certainly moved on . . . at our expense, I remind you. And you are NOT suggesting that we drive this vehicle into the heart of Double Bay, are you, Nina? We’d have our own postcode!’

‘By the way, where
are
we going to stay in Sydney?’ asked Annie.

Nina hadn’t thought that far ahead, and had just assumed they’d find a park for the van . . . somewhere. Maybe overlooking Bondi Beach. She’d always wanted to go there. She wished she had the boys along for the adventure, to see the famed bronzed Aussie lifesavers and surfers.

On thinking about her brood, she checked her watch: 8.15 am. They should be getting out the door by now—if Brad wasn’t still asleep and snoring. Had he taken the bread out of the freezer last night for their lunches? Had anyone remembered to feed the dog?

All these thoughts were stressing Nina out. It was ridiculous that she was away for so long. Why was she here, exactly? ‘I’m sure there are plenty of places we can stop,’ she said, annoyed by their questions. Why did she have to plan everything for everyone all the damned time?

As it happened, Meredith had been formulating her own plans. ‘Well, if we’re going right into Sydney, I think we should ditch the van somewhere, splash out and get a hotel room. I’ll definitely be ready for a hot bath by then.’ Annie smiled into her coffee. The woman entranced with ‘roughing it’ was already dissolving in a frothy honey-scented bubble bath.

Nina snatched up her map. ‘Except that I don’t have the money for that. It would probably cost us five hundred dollars each, by the time we take taxis everywhere. If push comes to shove, we can camp in Centennial Park.’ She gathered the coffee, sugar and milk into her arms and stalked off. Meredith and
Annie watched her go. They were all tetchy, struggling to warm up in the chilly morning air, like the rest of the wildlife in the bush: Annie a bristling echidna to Meredith’s imperious brolga and Nina’s blundering wombat.

Meredith shivered and wrapped her scarf tighter around her neck. ‘She’s crazy. She can’t be serious. Centennial Park? We can’t turn up and block out the sun in one of the most exclusive neighbourhoods in the whole of Australia. I know quite a few people living around there. I’d never live it down.’

Annie agreed. ‘What if we want to go out to some fab restaurant? Does she think we’re all going to frock up inside that thing?’ She jerked her thumb towards the van and saw that Elvis’s ebony quiff was now shining supernaturally as the first rays of sunlight hit the side of the van.

‘Maybe we should just avoid Sydney altogether. I’ve got nothing to say to that media slut, Corinne Jacobsen.’ Meredith folded her arms in disgust.

Annie clunked her empty coffee cup on the table, astonished by Meredith’s language, but even more alarmed at the thought of missing out on the oasis of shopping in the middle of their trek through the retail desert. After all, a woman was not a camel.

‘We
have
to stop in Sydney!’ Annie pleaded. ‘All that stuff with Corinne? I’m sure she had her reasons for what she did. Forget it. We’ve all changed since then. Look at us. Look at Jaslyn! Who would have thought a hippie like her would end up in a war zone, but there she is in bloody Afghanistan!’

Meredith remained silent.

‘Probably the only one who hasn’t changed is Nina,’ muttered Annie. ‘Not that I think she realises that.’ She turned to see Nina puffing as she wrestled the camp chairs into the locker at the rear of the van. They both watched as she swore and swung her leg back to give the chairs a mighty kick. Meredith’s eyes widened and she jumped to her feet.

‘Nina, don’t! Be careful of my—’

A muffled tinkling of broken glass signalled a thousand dollars worth of Fabergé crystal glasses coming to grief. Nina gasped, covered her face with her hands and fled into the bush.

Apart from the well-signposted crossing of the state border, there were a few more clues that the RoadMaster Royale was now motoring through New South Wales. For one, the quality of the roads immediately deteriorated. This state was bigger, and there was apparently not enough asphalt to go round.

‘The bigger the state, the lower the IQ,’ said Annie. ‘But that doesn’t explain Tasmania,’ Meredith deadpanned.

The road signs erected by the authorities had also changed. Instead of the Victorian nanny-state nags—‘
Weary? A microsleep can kill you!
’ and ‘
Tired? Take a powernap now!
’—the warnings were more sinister: ‘
Police now targeting speeding
’. Nina eased her foot off the accelerator. Brad wouldn’t be happy if she copped a fine.

She was even more spooked that Meredith was staring resolutely out the window and wouldn’t meet her eye, despite her earlier tearful apology for the smashed wedding gift and the offer of
a cheque to cover the cost. Mercifully, k.d. lang was crooning from the CD player, doing her best to soothe frayed nerves.

They’d hit the Sapphire Coast.
A wonderland of natural beauty featuring pristine beaches, forests, mountains and waterways
, according to the pile of pamphlets Annie thumbed through at a service station just over the border.

Nina paid for the petrol, and then retreated to the shabby ladies’ room and tried Brad’s phone again. It was switched off. She was blinking back tears as she rang Jordan’s phone, and tried to sound cheery as she left a message: ‘Hello, darling. It’s Mumma. Have Marko and Anton got their bags packed for Canberra? Tell Marko not to forget his asthma pump. And they need sunscreen. Tell your father to call me so I can make sure they have everything. Did you remember to hand in your assignment? Did you feed the dog? Don’t forget to when you get home tonight. Bye, Jordy. I miss you. I’ll call you later.’

Then she was scrabbling for rough paper towelling from the dispenser and scraping at her eyes. Nina peered at herself in the mirror splattered with dried soap and dead insects. ‘You are pathetic!’ she sniffed at her reflection. ‘Just stop it! You’re the one who wanted to take this trip. Grow up! Get a grip!’ She splashed her face with water, retied her flyaway hair and returned to the van.