My arms tighten around her.
A line of sentry ants climb the tree, following the scrawl in the bark. A crack of thunder disturbs the distance and the rain returns, sheeting in, funnelling off the leaves. In a land where it rarely rains, we huddle under the flimsy shelter of groaning branches.
Sophie reaches down for my hand. Our fingers entwine. She turns and leads me back to the car.
As I put on my seatbelt, she says, in a faint voice, ‘I might sleep. Whistle when we reach my town.’
She reclines the seat, tilts her head towards the window and closes her eyes. I look out on the forcing rain, the blurred horizon, the pale sky. We’re three hundred kilometres from my new school. I picture a boy from Year Six running across the playground to the verandah outside the principal’s office, knocking on the door and grabbing the old-fashioned bell on the desk, walking back to the balcony and swinging it low and rhythmic by his side, clanging across the town. Lunchtime and the new teacher still hasn’t arrived. The boy running back to class, stamping in every puddle he can find.
My lecturer stopped attending classes and was replaced by a young woman, one of the tutors. I saw him again a year later promoting his first book on morning television. He was wearing a suit and tie and looked healthy and robust. He held the book in his hands, as if it were a precious diamond.
Angela inhales deeply and slowly. She holds the breath, relaxes her lungs, closes her eyes and drifts. The only sound she hears is the wind outside, the breath inside.
A voice whispers.
Release.
Repeat.
Slowly.
You are a good parent.
You are a confident, mature woman.
You do not have to talk to your son every day.
Trust him. Trust yourself.
As a parent.
Michael will be home soon. Perhaps she should join him in giving up drinking for the duration, as an exercise in restraint.
Not like last night.
She considers an evening at the local restaurant, where they make elaborate cocktails that not even Michael could resist. Aperol Honeymoon – such a name for a drink. With a slice of orange, ice and tiny umbrellas on sticks. And Michael’s favourite dish cooked by that French chef: duck roulade. So simple and delicate and rich and . . .
Breathe deeply and slowly.
. . . and forget about food and drink and James and whoever he’s with and please Lord don’t let it be a woman, a woman to lead him away. Let James be sitting beside an old man in shabby clothes who he’s taken pity on and offered a lift west to a drought-stricken farm with a broken gate and a fence that can’t hold the livestock or keep out the foxes and rabbits and dingoes. An old man with body odour sitting on the BMW’s leather upholstery. And James wasting his time when he should be starting at the school.
Angela glances at the wall clock: thirty minutes until Michael gets home.
This is meant to be her half hour of calm.
No thoughts of James, or food or drink, or her husband who came home last night as relaxed as if he’d spent the day meditating. How could he be so calm when his only son is God-knows-where with God-knows-who?
Stop.
Breathe.
Unwind.
Angela clenches her fists and wonders what is the point of sitting cross-legged on this rug telling herself to breathe and relax when she can feel the blood pumping in her veins and her heart racing like a child’s.
She does not need to learn how to breathe! It comes naturally. Like eating, and drinking, and worrying. All mothers worry.
Her feet are tingling; they’ve gone to sleep. At least they’re relaxed!
Angela straightens her legs, lies back on the rug and stares at the ceiling. She remembers being ten years old and talking to the local shopkeeper, the nice old Irish man with the lilting voice and the sparkling eyes, while unknown to her, her brother stuffed his pockets at the far end of the counter. Angela smiled at Mr Doyle’s jokes and accepted the musk stick he offered as a gift for her good manners. She waved back to him from the door.
And not one minute later, her brother displayed the contents of his pockets on the park bench. He ripped open the packet of Minties and offered her one. She felt her cheeks turn beetroot red. Simon laughed and threw a Mintie onto her lap. She hurled it back at him with all her strength.
She cried and cried until she reached the front gate at home, Simon in hot pursuit, sure she was going to tell on him. He dropped most of the Minties scrambling to catch up to her.
Their mother was hosing the gardenias when Angela unlatched the gate, sniffling.
She made it to the bedroom without her mother noticing and stayed there. Simon prowled the hallway outside, on guard.
But Angela never told anyone.
The Doyles closed shop a few weeks later. Her mum said Mr Doyle had retired because he was very old. A new family took over the store and rearranged the interior. The musk sticks were now kept in a jar on the shelf behind the cash register. Angela could no longer smell them while standing at the counter.
Simon is now a lawyer who lives interstate. He has two children of his own and lectures them regularly on right and wrong.
Angela closes her eyes and wonders once again where James is.
After Sophie walked away from home, it took nine hours of slow hitchhiking to reach a town with too many pubs and too few barmaids. She walked down the wide main street to the only public phone box. The connection was so bad she had to shout for her father to hear.
‘Soph?’
She told him she loved him.
‘What? Say again?’ he repeated.
She yelled her love down the line but it went dead in her hand. She thought of her mobile, forgotten on the dressing table in her room. That night, she wrote her father a letter and signed it with love and kisses. She wondered if Dave had told him about Brad or decided a broken nose was punishment enough.
The publican at the Central Hotel offered her a job and a room upstairs that opened onto the verandah. In the late afternoon she watched the sun set over the wheatfields, glinting off the corrugated iron roofs of the town.
Roofs, Cardigan? Rooves?
Sophie liked her hotel room, even if the bed squeaked and the door rattled in the wind.
She spent hours on the verandah, her feet resting on the wooden railing, watching the postal van pull up every evening at six, with the mailbags slung carelessly in the back. The postie always tooted his horn at a large woman in vibrant red jogging shoes trundling alongside her German shepherd.
Sophie kept watch for the two boys strolling to the basketball court for a game of one-on-one. They were no older than fifteen, but they whistled when she leant over the railing. She whistled right back and they laughed. One evening, the tallest boy blew her a kiss and she felt special, even from a distance of fifty metres. She accepted the kiss graciously.
She went for walks along the highway verge in the early mornings and picked the wild paper daisies and flannel flowers. She used empty Coke bottles as vases and decorated her room. She washed her clothes in the sink and hung her dresses from the verandah doorway. She trawled the internet on the office computer until she found a photo of her father, manager of the Warriors Under-16 footy team, and printed it out so she had something to treasure in her wallet.
The town had a Salvos shop that opened only on Friday. Sophie flipped through the racks of frilly dresses, nursing uniforms and stretched tunics smelling of camphor and mothballs. She found a long black dress and held it up in front of herself, smoothing the fabric. Was it silk? She spent a full ten minutes trying it on, admiring the fit in the dressing-room mirror.
‘All right in there, dear?’ The op-shop woman’s voice was as fragile as crystal.
‘It’s . . .’
‘Perfect? Lovely?’
Sophie pulled back the curtain and the old woman said, ‘Perfect. There’s no other word for it. Lovely.’
‘That’s two words.’
They both laughed. Sophie drew the curtain again and carefully took off the dress, checking the stitching, making sure the fabric wasn’t too faded. Perfect. Nothing’s perfect, not even a dress. She smiled into the mirror and noticed the crinkles form at the corners of her eyes. You end up with the face you deserve, her father had said. She determined to smile more often. ‘Give me lots of wrinkles.’
‘What’s that you say, dear?’
Sophie took the dress to the counter.
‘I was talking to myself, sorry.’
‘Not at all. A friend you can trust.’
‘Who?’
‘Yourself. I do it all the time. Much easier than talking to my husband.’
That night at the pub, the drinkers were crowded along the bar. Sophie and Amanda were busy pulling beers and giving change for the poker machines along the back wall. When Sophie finally took a break, she sat out the back on an empty keg, watching a cat prowl along the top of the fence.
The publican joined her. ‘Drinking is up a truckload, Sophie.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Because of you. Blokes are coming from the other pubs.’
‘So are you offering me extra money?’
He shuffled his feet and would have looked at his toes if he could see them over his fat gut. ‘Yeah . . .’
Sophie looked up at the stars and wondered if they were twinkling in response.
‘I’d be prepared to offer five dollars an hour more.’
The stars were positively glowing, the moon smiling.
‘Great, thanks.’
‘That’s the award wage for lingerie work.’
Was that a cloud? Or just this fat bastard blotting out the sky?
‘Pardon?’
‘Lingerie.’
‘See-through, you mean. Show my tits to a bunch of men?’ The evening had turned to shit. ‘No.’
‘Amanda said she’d do it.’
‘Bull.’
He shrugged and turned back into the pub. She watched him walk away, all that weight on his skinny bow legs.
‘Hey, Trevor.’
He turned, hands on hips.
‘I’ll do it on one condition. You wear the same clothes I wear.’
A few days later, Trevor had a dental appointment in the next town. Amanda covered for her while she went into Trevor’s office and dialled her father’s number. She closed her eyes as the phone rang. Please let it not be Brad who picks up.
‘Hello?’
‘Dad?’
‘Soph, where are you?’
‘I’ve found a job, Dad.’
‘Come home, Soph.’
‘No . . . not yet. I will. Just not now.’
‘Brad says he’s sorry. Dave told me all about it.’
‘He did?’
‘It was a misunderstanding. Brad just meant to surprise you, barging in with the camera running. The stupid bugger should have knocked.’
What on earth had Dave said?
‘We’ll forget all about it, Soph.’
‘I won’t.’
‘He didn’t know you’d be . . .’
So that was Brad’s story. A practical joke gone wrong. Should she tell her father the truth?
‘I can’t talk long, Dad. It’s the work phone. I’m going to the city for a while. I need some time . . .’
‘Your mother left without a word too.’
‘I’m not her! I’m nothing like her.’
‘Then come home, Soph.’
She looked across the room at the photo frames on the wall. One was of Trevor and a short, stout woman in a floral pink and white dress. Another showed Trevor and three other men standing in front of a dead boar, each holding a rifle. Trevor had one foot resting on the carcass, a proud grin on his face.
‘Soph?’
‘I’ll write when I get to Sydney, I promise. I love you, Dad.’
‘Love you, Soph.’
She could write, telling him the truth about Brad. But what would that prove? That she was right to leave.
And what would be the cost? She thought of her father spending every weekend on the sideline at the football; his devotion to his children and all those years without a wife to help him.
What if he lost faith in his boys?
No, she’d keep the peace. And, for now, she’d stay hundreds of kilometres away from home.
On the same day that Amanda started her shift wearing a see-through top, Sophie saw the Car for sale notice in the butcher’s window. It was a beige station wagon, the same age as Sophie. She took it for a test drive and offered the owner – a mechanic who was a regular at her pub – two hundred dollars less. When he tried to resist, she promised him free beer next time he was in: the most expensive beer he’d ever had.
The mechanic dropped the car keys into her hand and took the money.
‘She’ll last for years, this old girl.’
Sophie noticed the oil stains on his knuckles, deep in the skin, and hoped that oil wasn’t from her car. Her new second-hand station wagon had a mattress folded in the back – a place to sleep as she travelled to the city. It was time to leave.
‘What’s her name?’ she asked the mechanic.
‘Hey?’
‘You called her she.’
‘Did I? I’ve called her lots of names, let me tell you.’
A shiny new Subaru pulled up at the petrol bowsers and his attention shifted. Sophie picked up the papers from the counter and gripped the keys. ‘Mabel.’
‘What’s that?’ The mechanic wiped his hands on the rag hanging behind the entrance door.
‘Mabel. The sort of name that won’t let you down.’
Sophie drove slowly through the town, listening to the engine – not exactly a purr, more of a grudging rumble. Mabel struggled past the shops, contemplating the long journey to Sydney, and coughed smoke. She’d make it, if Sophie didn’t ask her to do too much. Mabel wasn’t up to flirting with trucks, playing on the wrong side of the road or burning rubber at traffic lights.
Sophie parked on the patch of dirt near the train station and sat behind the wheel, looking across the road to the pub; her eyes drifted up to the window of her room and she thought of the long nights in bed, dreaming of Cardigan with his hair tied back in a ponytail and the faint smell of flowers on his clothes. Where did that scent come from? Sophie had added rosemary oil to the sink in her room one night as she washed her barmaid uniform, hoping to recreate the smell of Cardigan. When the fabric dried, it was stained beyond wearing.
During her last afternoon shift, Sophie watched the men who usually drank on the footpath drift towards the bar to ogle Amanda. Trevor pasted next week’s roster on the wall, Amanda granted double the hours.
At the end of her shift, Sophie went up to her room and packed her bag, sat on the verandah watching the street below, and blew a parting kiss to the basketball boys. They cheered and made rude gestures. Sophie wondered how long it would be before they had their faces pressed to the window of the pub to look at Amanda.
Early the next morning, Sophie closed the door and made her way quietly along the verandah. She shielded her eyes from the sun rising over the plains, slung her backpack over her shoulder and walked gingerly down the fire-escape stairs, slippery with dew. Mabel’s front radiator grille appeared to be smiling. Sophie wiped the moisture from the back window with her hand, sending shivers along her arm. She stood beside the driver’s door and looked down the main street, towards home.
She pictured her father, three hundred kilometres west, in his slippers and dressing-g
own, going to the kitchen, spooning oats into the saucepan, adding water and a pinch of salt and putting it over a low flame for the boys when they woke. He’d put bananas in the centre of the table with a carton of milk and a bowl of sugar. He’d go to the bathroom and wash while the porridge slowly thickened, wondering if there was enough bread for toast. Maybe he’d walk to the shops to buy another loaf, just in case.
Sophie imagined him looking in the mirror at his stubble, flecked with grey. On the way back to the kitchen, he’d pass her room and stop at the door, looking at the bed with its clean sheets and pillows neatly arranged.
She was sure he’d keep her room spotless, ready for her return. She’d heard it in his voice on the phone.
Sophie took a deep breath and opened the door, slid behind the wheel and buckled the seatbelt.
‘East, Mabel, as slow as you like.’
The old girl started first time. Sophie adjusted the rear-view mirror and released the handbrake, easing the car gently over the gutter and turning onto the highway. She switched on the radio to hear news of another flood up north – water was swirling under houses, through shopping centres and across cane plantations, while boys in kayaks paddled down the streets. She stared into the horizon, flat and brown where it hadn’t rained in months.
We drive past a grimy farmhouse outside of Sophie’s town, with chickens pecking in the dirt and a dog roaming to the extent of its leash. A welcome sign at the crossroads is pockmarked with bullet holes.
I reach across and touch her arm. She rubs her eyes, adjusts her seat to upright and nervously fingers the folds of her skirt. It’s stopped raining and a feeble light slopes in.
‘It’ll be fine, Sophie. Your dad will be happy to see you.’
My words fall in the space between our seats.
At the street corner, two girls lean against a concrete wall. The girl with the ponytail is texting. The other finishes a can of Coke and drops it in the gutter.