Roadside Sisters (16 page)

Catching the eye of Meredith sitting in the passenger seat, Nina saw her quickly look away. Nina’s shoulders slumped. She wasn’t good with conflict, never had been. She would just avoid talking to Meredith until she was in the mood to forgive.

In another hour they were approaching the sprawling coastal town of Eden. Annie attempted to thaw the ice between Nina and Meredith by sitting up front and parroting every fact she could from the tourist pamphlets on the history of whaling in Twofold Bay: ‘“One of the most bizarre aspects of the local whaling trade was the role played by pods of killer whales. From 1843 until 1930 they returned every year to Leatherjacket Bay and, after herding migrating whales into the bay, the killer whales cooperated with the whalers in their boats to attack blue, fin, minke and sperm whales. The killers harassed and snapped at their prey and threw themselves over the whales’ blowholes.”’

‘Can you believe any creature could be so inhumane?’ said Nina.

‘They’re animals, not humans,’ snapped Meredith. ‘“Nature, red in tooth and claw”. Ever heard that saying? Alfred, Lord Tennyson, I think you’ll find.’

Annie poked her tongue out at the back of Meredith’s head and continued reading: ‘“They were even known to alert the whalers to their quarry’s presence by breaching and splashing in the bay in front of the whaling station. They were rewarded for their treachery with the lips and tongue after the whalers had killed the prey.”’

‘Isn’t that awful?’ Annie was genuinely appalled.

‘When you think about it,’ Meredith said, without turning her face from the passing undulating hills, ‘it’s not so different to what Corinne did to us.’ Annie threw her pamphlets on the floor and retreated to a seat in the back.

The towns of Eden, Pambula, Merimbula and Wolumla were driven through in utter silence. No-one could even bring themselves to argue about what music to play. By the time the van topped the rise overlooking the little town of Tathra—the waves in the bay cresting into whitecaps blown by a stiff breeze, and the dusky timbers of the old steamer wharf warmed to orange by the autumn sun—Annie had had a gutful.

‘This is fucking ridiculous!’ she stormed as Nina parked the vehicle. ‘I am going to make us all lunch and you two are going to sit here and work this out. Or else I’m getting off and hitching back to Melbourne.’

‘I don’t know why you have to swear all the time,’ Meredith said primly. ‘I really don’t like it.’

Annie leaned forward into the cabin. ‘Listen, Meredith. You swore as much as anyone in the old days. I’m sorry if it offends the new you,’ she said in a tone that was anything but apologetic. ‘It’s the way I express myself and it’s not because I’m an uneducated idiot with no vocabulary. Z
ephyr, synergy, tryst, effigy.
There you go—there’s a decent Scrabble score. I swear because I like to swear—and I swear the two of you are driving me FUCKING INSANE!’ Twin door slams announced that Nina and Meredith had, like Elvis, left the building.

Alone at last in the humid cocoon of the van’s interior, sunlight slanting through the venetian blind, Annie reached into the fridge for her first bottle of the day. She set out olives, cheeses, sliced ham, crab dip and pita bread on the table and stepped outside. Sitting on a fence rail in the shade of the van, she fired a cigarette and idly watched a young couple stroll up
the street. He was wearing a T-shirt and board shorts, his feet were bare and he was carrying a blue cattle dog pup in strong, tanned arms. She was tall and lean with long sun-bleached hair, wearing a pink singlet and paisley peasant skirt. They were greeted by friends who patted the puppy and lingered to chat. Wandering further along, they waved at a car going by and then ambled into the supermarket.

Annie couldn’t take her eyes off their leisurely parade. It was the way her family used to dawdle up the main street of Tongala. She knew everyone back home. And everyone knew her. All the scandals. Who had married who. Everyone’s business. ‘The ins and outs of a duck’s bum,’ as her mum would say. She recalled the time Grandad had warned her to be careful walking across the main street. ‘Remember that terrible business when the youngest MacDonald kiddie got flattened by a milk truck!’ When had that happened? ‘1947,’ he answered, as if it were yesterday.

It was a genuine ‘insert-your-name-here’ moment. It struck Annie that what she needed was a sea change. Of course, she’d thought of it before, but never made any real plans. What was stopping her? She could live by the ocean—not in the flat dry country where there was no future, nor the sharp-edged city that had no past she cared to remember. Neither of them suited her. She could find a small property here. Grow herbs, fruit trees, vegetables. She’d always taken care of the kitchen garden at home on the farm. She would have a chicken run, grow a few fat lambs and maybe find a part-time job at the local real estate agency. She’d have a blue cattle dog pup and
a horse, walk on the beach, camp out in the bush and maybe, just maybe, she could find a man to share it all with. And if she did, perhaps there would still be time for children. If that’s what she wanted.

Annie ground out the cigarette under the toe of her boot. Giving them up would be easy when she lived by the ocean. She finally understood why she’d come along on this trip and why she’d drawn the Death card in that tarot reading. Annie had taken it literally at the time and had been keeping one eye out for broken bridges and steep cliffs. Now she saw it could also have been about the beginning of a new life. She could spring the trap and be free.

By the time the others returned from their solitary walks—Nina first, then Meredith—the bottle of wine was almost empty. When they were both sitting at the table, two sullen lumps of self-absorption, with really shitty windblown hair, Annie happily noted, she opened another bottle, poured three glasses and set them on the table. ‘Right. Who’s going first?’

Meredith surveyed the table setting and registered, in a nanosecond, that Annie had done quite well—although her napkin folding left a lot to be desired. ‘I just want to know what Nina thinks she’s achieving with all this ceaseless activity,’ she said stiffly as she began methodically refolding her square of sky-blue cotton.

Across from her, Nina looked down at her rumpled lap and immediately catapulted headlong into a regretful explanation: ‘I’m sorry. I know I’m being hopeless, but I haven’t been able to ring home and . . .’

‘It’s two days, Nina,’ Annie began. ‘You’re barely two days from home. What do you think could possibly have happened to Brad and the boys in that time?’

‘Hah! Obviously you don’t have kids,’ Nina said carelessly. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Annie. I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m used to it.’ Annie shrugged off her condolences. Comments like that wouldn’t worry her from now on, because she had a plan for a whole new life. ‘But it’s not like your kids are babies.’

‘I know. It’s just that I’ve never been away from them this long since they were born—apart from that time I had my veins done—and I’ve been trying to get them on the phone. I know we all promised but . . . anyway, there’s no answer.’ Even as she said it, Nina could hear her sons telling her she was ‘Duh . . . retarded! We’re not going to die while you’re away, Mum!’

‘In fifteen years? Never?’ Meredith was incredulous. ‘You mean you and Brad have never had a holiday—even a weekend away—just the two of you?’

‘Brad always had football on the weekends . . .’

‘What about the summer?’ Annie wasn’t about to accept Nina’s pat excuse. ‘He doesn’t manage a cricket team as well?’

‘We went away camping quite a bit. We even went to Fiji once. But the boys always came with us, so . . .’

‘Forget all that,’ Meredith spoke up. ‘It’s the constant nagging. Bossing us around. It has to stop.’

Nina had heard it all before. Brad was always telling her she was a nag. She grimaced into her glass. ‘Actually, it’d make a good k.d. lang song.
Constant nagging . . .
’ she sang.

Annie leaned over the table into Nina’s face. ‘Very funny! But you should hear yourself! You’re driving us fu—sorry . . . nuts.’ Uh-oh! She saw that tears were imminent.

‘I know,’ Nina snuffled. ‘But if I’m not there for them . . .’

Meredith wasn’t about to let a few tears put her off. ‘What, exactly, could happen that Brad couldn’t take care of?’

They just didn’t get it, thought Nina. Everything could happen. Marko and Anton could be trapped in a horrible bus smash on the way to Canberra, and she wouldn’t be there to drag them from the tangled metal. Jordy could take some party drug and fall into a coma, and she wouldn’t be there at his bedside playing him his Red Hot Chili Peppers CD, even though all the medical staff said he was beyond hearing it. She wouldn’t be the first thing he saw when his eyelids fluttered and opened. The dog could get out and be run over, and she wouldn’t be there to scrape its flattened carcass from the road and bury it before the boys came home from football training. Brad could be in bed right now, undoing a lacy black balconette bra embroidered with rosebuds . . . Stop! She didn’t dare bring any of this up.

‘Nothing,’ she said finally. ‘But they’re so useless without me, and I just want to make sure—’

‘Enough!’ Meredith held her palm up to Nina’s face. ‘Ring the boys when they get home from school, if you really must. Tell them you love them and then, for God’s sake, just
let them be
.’

‘And try to enjoy the trip,’ Annie pleaded. ‘You’re the one who was desperate to come. If you haven’t been by yourself in fifteen years, try to remember what you were like
before
you got married and had kids.’

Nina reached for a table napkin and blew her nose. ‘What was I like? Tell me, I’ve forgotten,’ she implored, looking up at them with big possum eyes.

Annie smiled and sipped at her wine. ‘You? Hah! You were as sexy as hell.’

‘I was a lot thinner then.’

‘No you weren’t!’ said Meredith. ‘Not much. You were the blonde, voluptuous one with the cleavage all the boys wanted to take home.’

‘Why didn’t someone tell me?’

Annie had to laugh at Nina’s naivety. ‘Because, duh, there were seven of us, remember? It was a fight to the death for the couple of sunken-chested SNAGs who were brave enough to chat up a femmo gospel choir.’

‘And you’re forgetting,’ Meredith narrowed her eyes, ‘Corinne had already screwed all the cute ones.’

Annie and Nina pelted Meredith with table napkins and cushions, and harmony was restored. Not quite note-perfect, but then, they were still in rehearsal.

Soon enough they were back on the road and looking for the turn-off to the Mimosa Rocks National Park. Meredith had been studying the names of the local lakes and inlets on the road map—Wallagoot, Wapengo, Wallaga, Wagonga. The lyrical Aboriginal names sang to her like a lullaby. She was rocked back to the far-off days of her childhood and the tradition of the Sunday Drive.

When Meredith was a girl, it seemed every family in her street in Camberwell took to the road for a Sunday Drive. The ritual had been imported to Australia from Mother England in the 1950s, and the idea probably made sense over there. The average English family car usually had more windows, and was warmer, than the family home in Manchester or Leeds. Over there, it would have been a relief to get in the cosy car. In England there was also the concept of a ‘destination’, and something to see along the way. Within an hour the family would be at the seaside, touring a castle or pottering around a village’s Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. They would make it back home in time for tea. In Australia you could travel all day, to nowhere in particular, and see nothing but flat, blasted country, shearing sheds, sheep and more sheep.

‘I hated those damned drives,’ said Meredith. She had her bare feet up on the dashboard again and was polishing off a packet of wine gums. ‘Every Sunday morning after church, Edith would pack egg-and-lettuce or ham sandwiches, Kia-Ora 50/50 cordial, a great slab of madeira cake and a tartan thermos of tea into her wicker basket, and tuck it under her feet up front. Bernie would be running the FC sedan in the driveway, to warm up the motor. Kevin, Terry and I would fight over who got the window seats. Then we’d head out down Burwood Road, spot on eleven.’

Nina was scouring the roadside for the national parks sign and chuckling at the image of the Skidmores in their FC. In the old days, when they were travelling with Sanctified Soul, Meredith had often talked about her parents—Bernard Skidmore, the
upstanding suburban dentist, and his faithful sidekick Edith—but Nina had never heard this particular tale before. Annie, still refusing to abandon her spot between the front seats, was enjoying Meredith’s rave. In fact, she couldn’t recall her ever being so expansive about her childhood.

‘There were two options,’ Meredith continued. ‘A drive to a plant nursery in the hills—which wasn’t too bad, because there was Devonshire tea to scoff on the way home—or Bernie would say, “Let’s just see where we end up.” And, truly, he would just drive till the petrol gauge read half-full and he would stop, and we’d have lunch. Do you know, it didn’t matter where the hell we were—at a gravel truck lay-by, on a median strip with cars roaring by, in a roadside quarry. We would sit and eat our soggy sandwiches and drink warm cordial, while being attacked by blowflies, eaten by mosquitoes or poisoned by exhaust fumes. It was
beyond
!’