Roadside Sisters (3 page)

‘So she’d be . . . what? Twenty-four now?’ Annie was groping her way down the long corridor of the past, trying to make sense of it all.

Nina’s congratulations were heartfelt. ‘Well, that’s wonderful! You must be so proud, Mother of the Bride. Who’s she marrying?’

‘I have absolutely no idea. All I know is that his name’s Charlie. Coffee! Where’s that damned waiter?’

Annie and Nina exchanged a second’s glance that said it all. They’d better order more supplies and settle in for the duration.

‘I’d like a nightcap as well. Something sticky and hideously expensive,’ chirped Annie as she swivelled her diamond ring to catch a sparkle in the low light.

‘And chocolate-dipped apricots. It says on the menu they make them in-house.’ Nina clasped her hands and gave thanks for the imminent blessing of sugar.

‘Did you know Oprah Winfrey and her best friend Gayle have known each other for thirty years?’ Nina leaned across the table. ‘And they still call each other four times a day?’ She picked at crumbs of chocolate with pink-frosted fingernails. Nina wanted a friendship like that. Half the women in the English-speaking world did. Oprah had declared her unconditional love for her friend so often that her sentiments had mutated into a global epidemic of female inadequacy.

‘How hard could it be to get someone on the phone when you’re worth more than a billion dollars?’ Meredith scoffed.

‘They’re probably gay,’ Annie muttered under her breath as she sipped at her dessert wine.

‘And Oprah says,’ Nina continued, pausing to insert a nail into her mouth and suck, ‘that she feels like their friendship has been designed by some higher power.’

Nina caught the flicker of disbelief telegraphed between her companions. ‘Have you ever had a friend like that?’ she persisted.

‘No, and I wouldn’t want to,’ Meredith stated. ‘I’ve got enough going on in my life. Who’s got the time for all that? It doesn’t sound like a friendship to me. It sounds more like some “co-dependent relationship”. Doesn’t Oprah bang on about that sort of stuff?’

Nina wasn’t to be so easily dismissed. ‘What about you, Annie? Do you spend much time with your girlfriends?’

Annie tipped her glass in Meredith’s direction. ‘Same as you. Actually, most of my friends are men. I can’t stand the way women judge each other all the time. You meet another woman and she runs her eyes up your whole body—from your toes to the top of your head—like she’s doing this inventory. Sizing up a piece of furniture or . . . an overripe avocado.’

Nina guiltily ducked her head. She’d done it. Surveyed Annie’s trim figure, checked the size of her diamonds, taken note of the fabric and cut of her sleek black jacket, and her red lipstick, matching finger- and toenails. What had she deduced? That Annie must be looking at her and thinking she’d let herself go to hell. Nina caught her reflection in the mirror and saw that her hair looked like grated cheese piled on top of a baked potato.

‘And men don’t have this hideous insecurity about their looks and their lives,’ Annie went on. ‘Or if they do they’re better at keeping it to themselves. I couldn’t stand having someone constantly ringing and whining for reassurance. It’d be exhausting. Bore the shit out of me.’

Nina chose to ignore Annie’s detour sign and ploughed on: ‘I was thinking, while I was going through my scrapbooks, that you are the two friends I’ve known for longest.’ She chased flakes of chocolate around her plate with a plump thumb. The rest of the sentence was left unsaid, a silent accusation:
And you never ring me, ask me how I’m going, take any interest in my life.

Annie thought of her pack of cigarettes in her satin purse. She silently cursed the ‘no smoking’ signs and raised her hand for a Flaming Sambucca.

Meredith sneaked a look at her watch and peered into her half-full coffee cup. She took a deep breath. ‘So, Nina, how
is
everything with you?’

Some time around midnight—over the sound of waiters stacking chairs and clearing glasses from nearby tables—there was an
incident
. It had begun tidily enough as a polite conversation between acquaintances but had quickly slipped into a maudlin, syrupy morass of shared tears and secrets no-one had quite anticipated or was in any way prepared for. The result was—and everyone was hazy on the details of who said what, when, exactly—that they agreed they needed more than a few hours
together to celebrate their loving friendship of the past twenty years. The unlikely plan Nina hit upon was to drive all of them in her father-in-law’s motorhome from Melbourne to Byron Bay. It was a two-thousand-kilometre journey and she estimated it would take ten days. And if her father-in-law picked up the van in Byron, they could fly back after the wedding and be home in less than two weeks.

When she was later accused of setting up an ambush, Nina was prepared to accept liability . . . up to a point. It was true that she had first brought up the idea because she was the one with the vehicle in her driveway, but it was, in fact, Meredith who had cried. That had been a shock to everyone around the table, no-one more so than Meredith. If there hadn’t been tears, they could have made their excuses and moved on. It would also have helped if Annie hadn’t taken Meredith in her arms and given that heart-wrenching speech about ‘mothers and daughters’ and ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunities’ and ‘eternal regrets’, and then brought up her own latest depressing tarot card reading for good measure.

In the end, they were all culpable—including the waiter who had brought the complimentary round of 70 per cent proof grappa and said it was a wonderful ‘digestivo’.

When they said their goodbyes that night on the footpath, they had hugged and kissed and squealed with excitement at their forthcoming adventure. No-one dared to voice her misgivings and bear the bad karma of ruining the Oprah
Ah-hah
! So it wasn’t until each of them was driving home (after joking that the alcohol in the tiramisu had probably put them over the limit,
and deciding to chance it anyway) that all three began to panic and individually consider driving their cars straight off the Punt Road bridge into the Yarra River at the prospect of spending almost two weeks on the road together and talking to each other forty times a day.

Wrestling steering wheels back from the road’s edge and checking rear-vision mirrors for flashing blue lights, each began to trawl their memories for the details on how their fellowship had survived the past two decades. Did they even qualify as friends, they wondered? If the length of time they had known each other counted for anything, then they were. But how much did they know about each other’s lives, really? The three of them were as unlikely companions as you could find, but they were part of a matched set, like 1950s kitchen canisters of Flour, Sugar and Tea.

Despite their doubts about the pact they had made, they found themselves humming ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’. They had crossed the Yarra River—muddy and wide—and were being carried home in their various chariots: Meredith in her Audi Quattro with the pristine chocolate leather upholstery; Nina in the Honda Odyssey, which had twenty filthy football jumpers and thirty-five socks in the back seat; and Annie in her Mini Cooper, its ashtray overflowing, three empty vodka mixer bottles on the floor and now a good three months out of rego.

Annie’s phone call came as Nina was standing at her kitchen bench the next morning rereading a particularly inspirational article in
O
magazine: ‘
Women’s friendships are special. Women friends help us define who we are and who we want to be. They are a touchstone in our lives through family, marriage and childbirth. Female friends offer wise counsel and a trusting and deep constancy.
’

‘I was pissed last night. I can’t come.’

‘OH NO! Annie, why not?’ The disappointment came like a head-butt to Nina’s midsection. She dumped the magazine on the bench and paced the kitchen with the cordless. All morning she’d been on a high at the prospect of getting away. In her mind she was already lying on a banana lounge by a pool at Byron Bay with a banana daiquiri and the latest Jodi Picoult novel.

‘I’ve got so much on here at work,’ Annie sighed. ‘I’ve got three inspections just this afternoon. It’s all about time. Who’s got the
time
for this?’

‘I know that,’ Nina countered. ‘None of us has the time, but you’re the one who was talking last night about “lifelong regrets”. We were all remembering the great times with Sanctified Soul when we were on the road. How come we stop doing stuff, having adventures, having fun, just ’cause we’re middle-aged?’

The thought of being ‘middle-aged’ gave Annie a moment’s pause. ‘But you could go away with Meredith. You don’t really need me.’

‘Well maybe we don’t need
you
, but you need
us
. You’re paying total strangers to read your fortune. How crazy is that? What you need is “wise counsel
”
from female friends
.
We’ll tell you all about your life for free.’

‘Yeah, well maybe that’s exactly what I
don’t
need. And I just had one card reading, that’s all. It doesn’t
mean
anything.’

This line of argument wasn’t getting Nina any closer to backing out of her driveway. She changed gear. ‘Look, if you won’t do it for yourself, at least do it for Meredith. The whole situation in Byron is going to be really hard for her. She could do with some support and validation.’

‘Nina . . .’ Annie rolled her eyes at the banal self-help jargon Nina had obviously picked up from daytime TV. ‘We’ll just be hangers-on. We don’t really know any of the family. I wouldn’t recognise Sigrid now if I fell over her, and Jarvis was three when I last saw him.’

‘Forget about the wedding then. That’s just one part of it anyway.’ Another smooth gear change. ‘Have you ever been to Byron Bay?’

‘No.’

‘Neither have I, but I’ve always wanted to go, haven’t you? It sounds amazing. All lush and tropical. Beautiful beaches and the water will still be warm. We can walk to the lighthouse. And I hear there’s great shopping.’

Nina wasn’t sure about the shopping bit, but threw it in for Annie’s benefit. She wasn’t above telling the odd lie. One of her most celebrated efforts had been activating the car’s windscreen washer and telling her three small boys that it was raining when they whined to be taken to the local adventure playground. The boys had been mightily aggrieved when they found out the truth years later, but the story was now part of family legend and Nina went on fibbing when it suited her.

Annie hesitated. It was a silence Nina could almost have driven a five-berth motorhome through. She put the foot down. ‘And you never know, Miss Bailey, you might meet some gorgeous men there. There’re tons of restaurants and bars right on the beach.’

‘Well . . .’

‘I tell you what, why don’t you come over on Saturday, say midday, and at least have a look at the van. I know you’ll love it. You can make a final decision then. Deal?’ Nina held her breath. She didn’t have anything more to offer right now. She could hardly say to Annie:
If you don’t come I might be tempted to drive myself off a cliff, and it will be your fault.

‘OK, deal,’ said Annie. ‘But don’t get your hopes up, that’s all.’

Nina replaced the phone and bent for the laundry basket. Two dozen Under-14s football jumpers and shorts to be washed, dried and folded. And there was another fetid pile of Under-16s
sports gear in the back seat of the Honda Odyssey. Nina reflected that it was an ironic name for her car.

‘Od.ys.sey n:
A long series of travels and adventures.’
Jordy had Googled it the day they brought the seven-seater home. The only long travels she’d taken in that vehicle had been from the house to school, from school to the supermarket, from the supermarket to the house, from the house to the football oval and back to the house. A daily round-trip of tedium.

As for adventures . . . ? The last ‘adventure’ she could recall was taking her mother, Wanda, to the Brand Smart Factory Outlet in Nunawading. Nina had sideswiped a green Barina in the car park and driven off without leaving a note. For a few kilometres there, she had been tailed by a police car down the Eastern Freeway. The thought that the ding in the Barina might be the first fateful act in an escalating odyssey of mayhem and murder stretching across three states was oddly thrilling and Nina’s sweating palms had slipped on the wheel. When she saw the cops peel off at the next exit—despite the pair of huge discount flesh-coloured control briefs Wanda was holding up for her inspection, blocking most of her view of the side mirror—Nina was both relieved and disappointed. It was hardly what you’d call a
Thelma and Louise
moment.