Roadside Sisters (11 page)

‘Grab the spray, quick! It’s under the sink,’ Nina called. Meredith found the can, pulled her nightdress over her mouth and carpet-bombed the van with noxious fumes.

‘Go outside! Go outside!’ she shouted muffled instructions and waved frantically at Nina, who dragged the bedclothes with her down the stairs. Moments later they were both standing on the wet grass, wrapped in a doona and shivering under the stars.

‘What about Annie?’ Nina asked.

‘The hell with Annie. I hope she chokes.’

A frog croaked. Meredith picked up a rock from the grass and pitched it into the bush. The love call of the lonely amphibian was silenced.

The next morning Ninety Mile Beach was cloudlessly, endlessly, brilliantly blue—from the top of the frame of Annie’s vision, then down through sky and sea to the bottom of the picture, where her white feet, decorated with red toenails, were striding along beige sand. Way up ahead she could see Meredith, who was apparently power-walking to Byron up the coast; and some way behind Meredith was Nina, head down and arms pumping with exertion.

They hadn’t woken Annie for breakfast and, judging by the silence which had greeted her hearty ‘Good morning’ and the careless slam of the door when they left for their walk, she was in trouble. And all of it over a few drinks! Well, that was probably an understatement. There had been more than a
few
drinks. She’d lost count after half a bottle of vodka, and that was on top of the champagne and wine she’d had before she made her heroic foray to investigate ‘Camp Yobbo’.

And how wrong had she been about that? The camp of ‘ferals’ had turned out to be two youngish and personable blokes from the western suburbs of Melbourne, both officials from the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union—the LHMWU. Which was fitting, considering that they had been exceedingly hospitable with their liquor. The ‘miscellaneous’ had turned out to be a spirited conversation about ‘social justice’, ‘globalisation’ and, when they discovered Annie was a real estate agent, ‘working families’ and ‘housing affordability’.

They were driving to Darwin—the Top End—on a boys’ own adventure and planned to catch at least one kind of every fish in the sea from Cape Schanck to Cooktown. One of them—was it Zoran or Matty?—had explained that playing the CD of eighties anthems was a time-honoured ritual to celebrate the life of the three-kilogram trevally they’d hooked from their tinnie. Annie remembered slow dancing to Australian Crawl, drinking, and, sometime in the early hours, kissing Matty. She also recalled that it was only the plastic pull-cord of a Mercury outboard motor digging into her shoulderblades that had made her stop and draw breath.

How had they come to be exchanging passionate kisses in that dark corner of a campground in Lakes Entrance? It was always like that on summer holidays, thought Annie. Sand under bare feet, salt on skin and the pulse of the ocean quickened the senses. Hearts and minds were loosed from their usual moorings. The universe was to be found in a tidal pool—the rhythm of life in the rush of water over rocks; grace and acceptance in the wave of the tentacles of an anemone; fate in the claws of a crab.

Annie kept up her brisk pace along the sand and saw the scattered debris of seaweed and the blanched bones of a fish stranded on the high tide mark. That’s how she’d found Matty. He’d been thrown up on the beach like a shell—worn smooth and clean by the sea—and she had bent to pick him up.

But then, Annie had picked up many men over the years and taken them home. And like those shells collected on summer holidays when she was a child, during the drive back to the farm they mysteriously lost their pearly sheen. By the time she
set her souvenirs on her bedside table they’d started to stink. The borders of her mother’s garden at the farm were still decorated with sunburnt shells brought home by Annie from summers at the sea.

Thinking about the farm, Annie found herself wondering how her parents might judge Matty. Her mother would describe him as ‘a bit of alright’ and her father would pronounce him ‘a decent stamp of a bloke’. A broad, burly sort of bloke who could haul haybales onto the tray of a truck from dawn till dusk, then charm the farmers’ wives down at the local pub with his old-fashioned good manners. But then that’s what they’d both said about her ex-husband, Cameron—and look how that had turned out.

Annie couldn’t trust her instincts about men anymore. She remembered noticing last night in the firelight that when Matty laughed his features quickly fell back into calm and symmetrical order in his open, placid face, just a moment before she had composed herself. She felt him looking at her in this split-second—while her head was thrown back and her mouth open with the hilarity of it all—and caught him seeing something she wanted to keep secret.

Annie wasn’t used to men trying to figure her out and didn’t know that she liked it much. Mostly men unloaded their problems on her, as if they thought that she, unmarried and childless, could have no real worries of her own. As if her life was an empty, featureless plain. Thinking on all this had made her reach for another drink.

The exact sequence of last night’s events was, mercifully, still a blur, but she did remember the kisses. Teenage summer holiday kisses. The kind of hot and salty smooches that had meant the two of you were going together. You were now a sandy, sunburnt young couple destined to be one, never to be parted . . . right through to Anzac Day. Although the names and faces had long since faded of the boys she’d fumbled with behind the caravan park toilet block or in the sand dunes, the promise of those kisses lingered.

When she’d finally made her way down the steps of the van this morning, it was as if the sandy-haired man in the red flannelette shirt, board shorts and rubber thongs had been an apparition. Matty, Zoran, the tinnie and the trevally had vanished. It was all too predictable. Just one more example of her crap timing.

Annie turned to see that the path of her footprints in the still cool, pale sand had been inundated by the lacy patterns of the tide. Her tracks had disappeared. And she found herself thinking of that silvery trevally and its bright, translucent, intelligent eyeballs, and wondering what it would be like when she was hooked from life and hauled over the side of the ferryman’s boat. Would there be anything, anyone, any ritual to mark the fact that Annie Amanda Bailey had ever walked upon the earth?

She bent to pick up a fragile pink-tinged shell and felt the blood thump in her skull. The world turned upside down and suddenly the sea was where the sky should be. Annie heaved and vomited her insides onto the beach. She wiped her mouth
and watched as the surf accepted her sour offering without judgment, sweeping the shore clean once more.

Nina was hot. Boiling hot. She’d tied her sweatshirt around her hips, pushed the dripping frames of her sunglasses up on her head, knotted the laces of her sports shoes and hung them around her sweaty neck and she was still hot. Her calves were screaming with indignation. Her elbows, every part of her was protesting.

Nina turned to the ocean and could see spots in front of her eyes. Grey, worrying smears across her lenses that surely must be the harbingers of a heart attack. That’s all she needed—to drop dead here on Ninety Mile Beach! Brad would have to drive all the way from Melbourne to pick up her huge, blubbery carcass and drag it home. If she did collapse right here, conservationists might try to roll her back into the ocean. She’d be in the news then:
Greenies Mistake East Malvern Housewife’s Body for Dugong.

Up ahead Nina saw Meredith pull up at some imaginary line in the sand and turn to march back down the beach towards her. Look at her, still lithe and fit—one of those portraits you saw in magazines under the heading:
Life Begins at Fifty: Four Women Tell.
Well, Nina could tell them life at forty-five, with an extra twenty kilos on board, was bloody hard going. Especially in sand. Even more so when you’d had about three hours’ sleep and tried to wake yourself up with a huge bowl of muesli, a sliced banana and two cups of milky coffee. And then, stupidly,
agreed to a walk along the beach. It was only 9 am but it was already hot and all was sand. Ninety miles of the stuff. Hateful, sinking sand.

Nina had woken at seven this morning. She immediately found her mobile phone and tried to call home, except her battery was flat. So she had plugged in her recharger and stayed in her scungy hard bed until the morning light hit the floor and revealed the corpses of a fallen militia of mosquitoes. She lunged for the dustpan and brush to sweep the dead down the steps. The rhythmic strokes soon restored Nina’s peace of mind. There was nothing so calming, she thought, as watching the swipe of a damp cloth or the drag of stiff bristles restore order to a surface.

By eight her phone was fully powered. She dialled home. No answer. She then tried to call Brad’s mobile. No response. Then she remembered that it was Sunday morning and, without her marshalling everyone downstairs for strawberry pancakes, bacon and maple syrup, they would probably sleep until midday . . . on Monday.

Nina turned to see the deep imprints of a lumbering, constipated brontosaurus behind her. She plopped her backside onto the beach. She was stuffed. Didn’t have another step in her.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

It was the only quote from Shakespeare that Nina had ever memorised from her high school studies. She would bet that the
Bard had never intended for those lines from the
Hamlet
soliloquy to be used by a fat middle-aged housewife to berate herself for eating too many hot chips.

Lowering her sunglasses and looking out at the sea, Nina caught the shadow of a circling sea eagle against the bright rays of morning. She watched the bird’s sleek form hover and then plunge, talons outstretched, to snatch a fish from just below the surface. The metaphor wasn’t lost on Nina. She’d watched too much
Dr Phil
. Drawn too many cards from too many inspirational decks of wisdom. Stuck too many
O
magazine tear-out postcards on the fridge to miss the message. That’s what she had to do—leave her earthbound, sweaty, lumpy body, fly to the horizon, dive and trust her instincts. She had to believe that, just below the seemingly impenetrable surface, there was a glittering prize waiting for her. Or was that just a line she’d nicked from a Danielle Steele novel?

In the meantime, The Journey Of A Thousand Steps had to start with the impossible trudge through the sand and over the bridge back to the van. She thought she might wait until Meredith passed her by. The last thing she needed this morning was a head girl urging her on with a lecture about the ‘intense satisfaction of digging deep and pushing on through one’s personal limits’. If Meredith tried that particular routine this morning, Nina might just have to drown her.

Meredith slowed her pace at the spot where Nina was slumped in the dunes and gave her a hearty salute. Good on her for
making it so far! It couldn’t be easy to start an exercise regime with a punishing walk in the sand after an interrupted sleep. Nina was a good-looking woman, and even a few stray kilos couldn’t disguise the fact.