Roadside Sisters (20 page)

When she later saw them in the schoolyard in drab grey and navy blue uniform, clod-hopping shoes and hair slicked straight, it was as if they had fallen to earth. The spell had been broken.

Nina jammed on the brakes and everyone lurched forward. She peered at the map—Pebbly Beach, Pretty Beach, Merry Beach . . . For the life of her she couldn’t remember which one was the venue for the surprise sunset cocktail party. Bugger! This was not like her—she had an almost photographic memory. It drove her family mad.

‘I want to see the surfing kangaroos,’ declared Annie, who had been reading the brochures again and become unofficial tour guide. ‘They’re at Pebbly Beach, so let’s go there.’

Pebbly Beach? Hmm . . . that seemed to ring a bell with Nina.

‘Surfing kangaroos? Surely not,’ scoffed Meredith.

‘That’s what it says here,’ Annie responded, shoving the brochure at her.

By late afternoon they were indeed marvelling at a mob of eastern grey roos grazing only metres from the shoreline at a wide and lovely beach. Only it didn’t look like any of them were about to hit the surf any time soon. And it didn’t look like Matty and Zoran would be joining them. The campground was full now and they weren’t anywhere Nina could see. She was cursing herself. Maybe they were at Pretty Beach . . . or was it Merry? It was like trying to remember the names of the Seven Dwarves. Oh well, Nina sighed, Snow White would just have to wait a while longer for her prince.

After walking across the rocks and poking at various starfish and crabs in tidal pools, they returned to the van and set up camp. Meredith and Nina were both at the toilet block taking a shower and Annie was wrestling with the annexe when the phone call came from Corinne: ‘Annie! You’ve called at exactly the right time! There’s no-one in this whole Sydney rat’s nest I trust anymore. I’ve got paparazzi camped outside the front door. I’ve had to take the phone off the hook. Malcolm’s away in Europe. I’d love to see you. But you’ll have to come here. No matter where I go, I’ll be followed.’

The plan was simple. Nina would drive the RoadMaster to Corinne’s place at Double Bay and go in the back gate; they would have dinner and park there for the night. ‘I can’t promise you much to eat. I can’t seem to drag my sorry arse out of bed,’ Corinne moaned.

Annie reassured her that the three of them would come and commandeer the kitchen. ‘That’d be fab,’ she sniffed. ‘And it’ll be good to see Nina . . . and Meredith. It’s time we forgot about all that stuff in the past. Anyway, I need a bit of TLC from old friends. Maybe we can all get blind and sing a few gospel songs in honour of my demise.’ Annie rang off and wondered how she’d break the news to Meredith.

After another five minutes of wrangling the stupid . . . fucking . . . ridiculous . . . annexe, Annie heard a nasty metallic snap and the ping of a bolt hitting aluminium. Now she would also have to break the news to Nina that she’d busted the annexe. Which one of her companions was going to be more pissed off with her was hard to gauge.

‘There’s no time to fix it before dark,’ said Nina as, hands on hips, she surveyed the limp awning.

‘A bolt snapped off. I heard it,’ said Annie.

‘Let’s just roll the thing up for now and I’ll ring Brad. This time I have to. We can’t let it just hang there like that. I want to say goodnight to Jordy anyway.’ Nina climbed in through the passenger door, found her phone and dialled.

‘Hello?’ The voice on the other end of the phone was young, tentative . . . and female. Nina heard a brief muffled conversation.

‘Hello? Brad? Are you there?’ she asked. The call was terminated.

Nina stared at her phone. She must have dialled the wrong number. She tried again. No answer. This did not make sense. She immediately dialled Jordan’s number: ‘Hello, Jordy, it’s Mum.’

‘Yep.’

‘How are you, sweetie?’

‘Fine.’

‘Is Dad there?’

‘He’s gone away.’

‘What? Where’s he gone?’

‘I dunno. Some chick was at our place crying. Dad went out with her.’

‘What “chick”? Where’d he go? You’re not making sense, Jordan.’

‘I told you, I dunno. Talk to Baba Kostiuk.’

‘She’s there? What’s she doing there?’

‘Hello? Nina?’

‘Mum . . . what are you doing there? Where’s Brad?’

‘Ah, Nina, you call at last. Brad had to go away for few days.’

‘A few days?’ Nina’s voice had risen in her throat. It was the strangled squeak of a cartoon mouse.

‘That’s right. I have come here to be with Jordy. I will sleep in Anton’s bed. You having a good time away from your family?’

Nina groped for some logic in her mother’s words and, after speaking with Wanda for another five minutes, found none. A screech of frustration and a kicking of cupboard doors surprised Meredith and Annie, who were standing on the grass catching their breath after their exhausting grapple with the annexe. They were inside in an instant.

The next hour was spent in intense interrogation around the table, as if Nina was in a police interview room.

‘You could have dialled a wrong number,’ said Meredith. ‘It could have been any woman who picked up his mobile from a table somewhere.’

Nina was unconvinced. ‘But what was he doing out the other night, leaving the boys by themselves? And Jordan said there was some girl at the house . . . crying. He left with her and now he’s away for . . . days . . .’ The thought of it sent her scrabbling for a tissue.

‘Has it occurred to you that the two facts might not even be related?’ Annie was doing her best CSI impersonation. ‘The girl at your place could have been some kid from down the street who fell off her bike. And, like Meredith said, the woman on the phone could have been . . . anyone. You’re mounting this case against him without any real evidence, as far as I can see.’

With a lack of facts to be going on with, and the liberal application of spinach gnocchi whipped up by Meredith, Nina
was finally coaxed off her windswept ledge. When the second bottle of chardonnay was opened, the cross-examination resumed. There were no grounds that anyone could discover for Nina’s assumption that her husband was having an affair—no unexplained absences, no change in his personal habits, no odd phone calls. As Nina told it, their marriage was right on schedule on the same old track.

And then Annie put the big one on the table: ‘How’s your sex life?’

Nina paused, whimpered and wiped her nose. ‘Well, you know. Fine. For people who have been married as long as we have and have three teenage boys in the house.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Annie.

‘That Brad’s always up for it. But I’m so tired from everything, and it’s hard to find time. And the boys’ rooms are right next door, so . . .’

‘So what?’ Again, Annie didn’t get it.

‘They’d think we were gross! If Brad even kisses me in front of them, they pull faces.’ Nina mimed hurling into the cheese platter Meredith had slid in front of her. ‘If they heard us actually having sex? Erk. Boys! Maybe it would have been easier if we’d had girls.’

‘Don’t kid yourself!’ Meredith snorted. ‘If I’d had even the slightest notion that Edith and Bernie were going at it on the Axminster carpet, I would have killed myself. In fact, even thinking about it now makes me feel nauseous. Count yourself lucky you didn’t have girls.’

‘Everyone says that,’ Nina replied.

‘Everyone’s right.’ Meredith picked at a piece of camembert. ‘I can talk to Jarvis about everything—I always could. But Sigrid? She’s a mystery to me. I think she resented me going out to work. She never wanted to talk about herself—who she was with, what she was doing. And at twenty-two she was gone. Moved to Byron.’

Annie pushed the tissue box closer to Meredith’s side of the table. This was threatening to be a soggy tennis match.

‘I’ve only had the odd phone call and email since. Now she’s getting married, and I’ve never even met the man . . .’

‘Let’s get back to Brad,’ Annie intervened. She couldn’t cope if the two women started weeping in unison. ‘The only fact we have in front of us is that Nina has a husband who loves her and his family very much. He’s hardly likely to be having an affair and bringing his mother-in-law in to cover for him! It must be some work thing, or something happening with his family maybe?’

‘I’ve rung his mother. She hasn’t heard from him,’ Nina said, her head drooping into her hands.

Annie sighed; she was exhausted with it all too. ‘We’ll have to give him the benefit of the doubt, that’s all.’

Meredith tore a tissue from the box, wiped her eyes and nodded. She was glad no-one wanted to linger on her own disappointments with Sigrid. She couldn’t quite believe she’d brought up the topic.

They said their goodnights. Reading lights behind drawn curtains cast a blue glow through the cabin. As Nina assembled her bed she reflected that, if she had been in East Malvern right
now, she would be standing by the foot of the stairs thinking about school lunches, sports gear, permission notes and pocket money. She would have been preoccupied, with no time to think about where her life was heading. And maybe that was a good thing.

When she climbed into bed with Brad, her mind would still be whirring with tomorrow’s impossible timetable. He would sneak his hand onto her thigh, wanting sex, and she would brush him away, knowing the revulsion he must feel at touching her fat white Bratwurst legs.

‘I’m tired, Brad. I’ve got so much on tomorrow.’

And he—dutiful father, loving husband—would kiss her cheek and roll over to sleep without protest. She loved him so much for his quiet acceptance of how things were with her. As he snored, she would look at his tightly muscled back and the long curve to his still-slim waist, and know that there would, inevitably, come a time when she couldn’t refuse her husband anymore. And that time would only come because he would stop asking.

Now, as she climbed into bed and ran her hands across her flabby stretchmarked stomach, she knew she was in a land of regret way beyond the sweet and comforting balm of chocolate.

Ulladulla, Nowra, Wollongong . . . almost three hundred k’s up the Princes Highway and the RoadMaster Royale did not falter as it sped its precious cargo towards Sydney Town. Nina had the measure of the machine now—she merged like a maestro, changed gear, indicated, sped up and slowed down with a smooth and confident grace. She was grateful for the cylinders, valves and pistons that were acting in concert to produce such a seamless performance. She glanced down to admire her strong forearms conducting the vehicle with such skill.

By the time they reached Sydney’s southern suburbs, Nina was weaving through the stream of traffic, imagining every car was a note on a musical score and she was conducting a big band—anything to stop herself thinking about home. She’d tried to ring Brad during the day and couldn’t raise him. The last person on earth she would call was her mother. She knew that Wanda would put her through the mother of all interrogations
with one aim in mind—to bully her into returning home. As confusing as things might be right now, Nina had no intention of taking that particular guilt trip back to Melbourne.

The three women were now, they reminded themselves, a long way from hearth and history, traversing places they had never visited before. And all of them, they reminded each other, were lucky to be women a long way from home.

When Annie had travelled to Paris in her twenties, it was the first time a Tongala Bailey had been to France since her great-grandfather had fought at Pozières in World War I. He had returned from that slaughterhouse to take up a Soldier’s Settlement farm in Tongala in the ‘Golden Square Mile’—the richest patch of farming land in Australia. And there he, and all the Bailey sons after him, had stayed. But they had not rested. They remained ever-vigilant, tight-lipped and upstanding against the spectre of the Dogs of War that might rise up and ravage the peaceful plains at any time. Photographs of relatives in uniform and medals in glass cases were propped above the Murray River pine mantelpiece in the drawing room. The Baileys were a cautious and frugal tribe and remained suspicious of the outside world. Annie was seen off to Europe with money and malaria pills, insurance, clean undies and her mother’s tears ironed into cotton hankies. When she wrote home, she was careful not to mention that she had shared a bunk in a backpackers’ hostel with a German boy.

As soon as she was able, Meredith had escaped the cotton-wool confines of the tidy, affluent suburb of Camberwell where she had grown up. She’d taken a perverse pleasure in sending
Bernard and Edith postcards from the most exotic locations she toured—Kathmandu, Istanbul, Casablanca—knowing that Edith would sluice an extra bucket of Pine-O-Cleen over the kitchen floor and that Bernie would drop another note in the contributions plate at St Mark’s to finance the Lord’s protection of her. When Meredith contracted dysentery in Bombay, she was almost proud of herself. Couldn’t wait to write. Her parents had probably incinerated the postcard for the sake of hygiene.

Nina was determined that one day she would visit the graves of her forebears. Her mother and father had both come to Australia as teenagers after World War II. Untold millions of Ukrainian men, including her grandfathers and six great-uncles, perished in that conflict. It was the women left behind who had rebuilt the country. Nina had heard many tales of her great-grandmothers selling roasted sunflower seeds and bunches of home-grown herbs outside the Lvov cemetery, to provide for themselves and their families.

This was the mantra of hard work and self-sacrifice she’d been raised on. Whenever she looked at another pile of football jumpers to be washed and felt like complaining, it was her Great-Baba Magdalyna offering a bunch of sage flowers she thought of, or her Great-Baba Glaphira warming her hands over a mean and spindly flame. Nina imagined them huddling in shawls against a winter wind that blasted the earthly names from the tombstones of a multitude of angels. And with that she would reach, with gratitude, for the fabric softener.