Roadside Sisters (19 page)

Nina was doing what she did best. She was a gatherer, trotting purposefully up the sun-dappled street with her woven dillybag over her shoulder. She had to notice, however, that hers wasn’t the only tribe of women on the block. Everywhere she looked there was another group with their heads bent over a felt scarf or a pair of earrings. Nina looked on as four women shrieked with laughter at the fifth, emerging from a changing booth in a ghastly crimson goat-hair coat. They seemed to be having a better time than she was having with Annie and Meredith. Maybe she had ‘friend envy’. Had Dr Phil ever done a show about that, she wondered?

Annie perused more real estate agents’ windows in the main street. The tiny farm she wanted to buy was a poor cousin to some of the properties available: ‘Only minutes from the pristine beaches of Mystery Bay, five hours south of Sydney, three hours east of Canberra’. She smiled to think that being three hours to the nation’s capital could be a selling point. How far was Tilba from ‘Bailey’s Flat’ at Tongala? She reckoned it to be about six hundred k’s as the crow flies—a solid day’s driving. This was the first roadblock in her path to freedom. She had no brothers or sisters and knew that one day everything would fall to her. With her father not well and the farm on hard times, that day could come sooner than she liked to think. Her hand-painted sign, threaded with ivy, creaked and crashed into the dust. Annie walked into the next shop and bought a handcrafted glass fruit bowl for her apartment back in Melbourne.

After an hour or so of shopping, Nina and Annie were done. They were now toting biodegradable eco-bags jammed with jars of preserved Burdekin plums, lemon myrtle tea sachets, packets of ground quandongs and tubs of mango moisturiser, macadamia-seed facial scrub and ti-tree-honey lip balm. Nina had found a hand-carved red-cedar spoon-rest she thought Wanda might appreciate, and had it gift-wrapped so Meredith wouldn’t spot it.

Just as Annie and Nina thought Meredith might as well have been wandering the aisles of Target back in Melbourne, they heard her swoon: ‘This is magnificent! Stunning!’ They found her standing transfixed in front of an oil painting of a shimmering watery scene. A woman floated on her back, silvery hair spreading like jellyfish tendrils.

Everyone agreed that it was indeed ‘magnificent’, and would make a perfect wedding present for Sigrid. Meredith was convinced to have it when the gallery owner informed her it had been painted by a local artist from the hills back up behind Tilba, a ‘rising star’ who had recently been included in an exhibition in New York. Nina duly handed over a cheque for the artwork and it was bubble-wrapped with infinite care. It was only some way down the street that Meredith realised what she’d acquired . . . Another bloody mermaid.

They were sitting at an outdoor table at Foxglove Spires under the vines—the van now parked across the road and stowed with their shopping—enjoying a coffee and a chocolate florentine after their organic pumpkin soup and ploughman’s platter, when
Nina spluttered and showered the table with half-chewed biscuit. She stabbed her finger in the direction of the next table, where an elderly chap in a tweed cap was reading the
Daily Telegraph
. The front-page headline read:
‘
CORINNE BONED!’ Underneath was a picture of the one and only Corinne Jacobsen, climbing into the driver’s seat of her silver Mercedes Sports. She looked distressed, in a fetchingly tabloid way. Her eyes were hidden by huge dark glasses, her mouth was a glossy petulant pout and one shapely leg ending in a patent stiletto was revealed from the folds of a slim black trench coat.

‘Shit!’ Annie exclaimed so loudly that the gentleman gave her a withering look, stood and—after collecting his startled good lady wife, plus their wisteria shrub and pottery platypus—left. The newspaper was abandoned on the table.

Annie pounced. ‘Fuck! They’ve sacked her!’

‘Ner, ark!’ Nina coughed and gagged again. A raisin had gone down the wrong way.

‘I know, unbelievable! Listen: “After fifteen years fronting Channel 5’s
Daylight
, television’s veteran hostess Corinne Jacobsen has been axed.”’

‘
Veteran
? She’ll hate that!’ Meredith chirped happily.

Annie shooshed her and kept reading: ‘“Insiders say she is set to be replaced by her younger rival, popular newsreader Candice Byrne. Channel 5 boss Desmond Hyde confirmed last night that he was seeking a ‘fresh direction’ for
Daylight
, which has been struggling in the ratings. He denied Jacobsen had been ‘axed’, but said the network would not be renewing her contract. The normally chatty Jacobsen was tight-lipped as she left the
set of the show yesterday morning, but friends say she is ‘gutted’ by the decision.”’

‘That’s awful!’ Nina had finally regained the power of speech. ‘I mean, how old is she—forty-eight, forty-nine?’

‘She’ll be forty-seven next month!
Fresh direction
? It’s bullshit! You see these blokes on TV who look a hundred years old. Double chins, nose hair, bald, eye bags—and everyone says they’re “distinguished”. Corinne still looks amazing. And she’s a great interviewer as well . . .’

Meredith, however, wasn’t buying it. ‘Honestly, it’s not that hard to get a reality show contestant to blab on . . . or some vacuous supermodel to prattle about her new skin-care range. And correct me if I’m wrong, but Corinne’s played the game for years, hasn’t she? With the Botox-brow, the collagen fish-lips. It’s finally caught up with her.’ She sat back and crossed her arms with satisfaction.

‘Like it catches up with most women in the media in this country, Meredith,’ Annie said tersely. ‘Corinne battled hard to get where she is. Show a bit of solidarity—you used to be good at that.’ Annie threw the newspaper on the table. ‘Let’s go! I’ll get this one and meet you out front.’

Nina rushed to sandbag the horrifying silence. ‘Poor Corinne! She’ll be feeling awful. We really should go and see her in Sydney. We’ll be there tomorrow night.’

Meredith grabbed her purse. ‘I don’t know why we’d bother. She’s probably jetting to the Bahamas as we speak.’

Nina busied herself with gathering her handbag. She hated confrontation, but was determined to go on with it. ‘You know,
Meredith, sometimes you can be so . . .’ She searched her mind for the word—
bitchy
?
mean
?
callous
?
unfeeling
?
unsympathetic
?—and finally settled on the term that would cause the least offence: ‘
strong-minded.
’

‘And that’s a bad thing?’ Meredith challenged.

Nina wanted to say yes, it was a bad thing. That it was no wonder that Sigrid had escaped as soon as she could, and never rang her mother. That it was perfectly understandable that Jarvis had moved a hemisphere away from her critical eye, and that Donald had probably taken up with another woman for exactly the same reason. If Meredith had been sitting in the hot seat on
Dr Phil
, they could have all lined up and told her. Dr Phil would probably have said something like: ‘Y’all have legitimate concerns with this lady’s behaviour as a wife, mother and friend. There’s prob’ly been only one perfect child on the face of the earth and that was the baby Jesus. He grew up to “confound the elders”. Meredith, what makes you so confounded certain about every darned thing?’ But Nina wasn’t Dr Phil.

‘Well, only in that it can be hard for the rest of us,’ she cautiously replied.

Meredith had heard this criticism before. ‘Am I supposed to unlearn everything I know, not be who I am, not tell the truth, so that everyone around me can “keep up”?’

Before Nina could find the courage to answer, Meredith stalked off around the side of the restaurant towards the main road.

Annie was standing at the cash register, still tapping her foot furiously, when she powered her BlackBerry. There were eighty emails demanding her attention. Quickly scrolling down the
screen she saw that they were mostly work related. One from a dreary country cousin who’d hit Melbourne and was looking for her; one from a boutique owner telling her the coat she’d ordered was in; a couple from male drinking buddies at the conference. As she suspected, her social life wasn’t exactly in full swing.

She tried Corinne’s number. It was, not surprisingly, switched off. She left a message. ‘Hi, honey, it’s Annie from Melbourne. I am
so
sorry. I can’t believe those bastards! I’m going to be in Sydney tomorrow night. In a bloody campervan, would you believe?! Don’t ask. Long story. Call me and we can catch up.’

She bent to collect her bag and then, out of the corner of her eye, saw the silhouette of a Toyota LandCruiser towing a tinnie drive past the front window. She knew parts of that outboard motor intimately. She fell out the front door onto the street. ‘Quick, quick! Get the keys! Let’s go!’

Meredith and Nina, standing by the kerb, had already spotted the procession. In fact, Zoran had leaned out the window and waved ‘G’day’, and Nina had enthusiastically waved back until Meredith grabbed her arm. As the tail-lights of the trailer disappeared over a rise in the road, Meredith stalled: ‘We’re going already? I was thinking of having another wander around the nursery.’

‘But I just saw them—those two blokes from Lakes Entrance. Didn’t you say they were looking for me?’ Annie tried to remain calm. She could hardly run up the street after them, screeching like some demented banshee. And, in truth, she didn’t know
what she would say if she caught up with them. ‘Maybe they’ve found my sunglasses . . . my good ones . . . they cost me—’

‘We know,’ Nina interrupted. She couldn’t stand the suspense. Why had Matty asked after Annie? Maybe he’d found her sunglasses, or maybe she’d been cast in a fairytale romance and this was true love. If this was a fairytale, Nina was the huntsman who had been ordered to take Snow White into the forest and couldn’t find the heart to kill her. ‘Come on,’ she blurted. ‘Let’s go! Except . . .’ she scrabbled in her handbag, ‘I can’t find the keys to the van.’

‘They’re in your hand,’ Meredith pointed out. Nina jiggled the bunch of keys and took off across the road. The chase was on.

After they’d driven up and down the main street of Central Tilba three times, surveying the Dromedary Hotel car park and various side streets, Meredith finally called off the emu parade. ‘They’re not here. And let’s face it, they’re hardly likely to stop off for a string of handcrafted beads or a poster of the Dalai Lama,’ she said as they drove past the Windhorse Buddhist Emporium . . . again.

As much as Annie didn’t want to admit it, Meredith was right. The trail had gone cold. There was nothing for it but to push on. Her fate was fluttering in the breeze like the string of Tibetan prayer flags on the front veranda.

‘Why don’t we spend the night in the Murramarang National Park?’ said Nina casually. She had to smile to herself. She’d kept this secret well. Little did Annie and Meredith know there was a surprise sunset cocktail party in the offing at . . . what was the name of that beach again?

Nina looked at her map and calculated they had roughly a hundred and twenty k’s to drive. As soon as they cleared the town speed limits, she put the foot down.

It was late afternoon by the time the van rocked down the Durras Discovery Trail into the Murramarang National Park. Meredith was really getting into the rhythm of life on the road now. It was simple. You parked, set up camp, ate, slept, woke, ate, took down camp, drove and . . . did it all again. She hadn’t checked her mobile phone for three days and reassured herself that Caroline would cope with the store. She’d have to. Meredith had barely looked in a mirror, and was in the same outfit she’d worn yesterday. She could finally understand those women who took to the desert with a water bottle and a string of camels.

Annie had one eye out the window for the tail-lights of a trailer with a tinnie. It was a hopeless mission. There was a string of national parks up the coast to Sydney—they could be in any one of them. But then, she reasoned, she knew where Matty worked and could always call him back in Melbourne. Except she wanted to see him again with bare legs, his hair smelling of salt—not sitting behind a desk in a collar and tie. She remembered holiday romances from the past and the bare-chested boys she had watched swing from the riverbank on ropes hanging from the branches of peppercorn trees. They were mythical creatures—tanned, heroic—all worthy of endless romantic fantasies.