Authors: Lily Malone
“Oh.” The faintest tint of red
stained her cheeks. “I assumed it was yours.”
“Easy assumption to make,” he
said easily. “You could come for a ride with me tomorrow if you want to check
out how the Pantah runs. I’m not doing anything. My cousin is about as much fun
at the moment as measles and I don’t know anyone else in town.”
“I don’t think so, Owen, but
thanks. I have a fair bit of work on.”
A crazy ghost of an idea
entered his head. “So if you’re a viticulturist, Olivia, I guess that makes you
an expert at pruning?”
“I don’t know about expert
exactly, but I know my way around.” Her head tilted to one side and she added:
“Why?”
“My aunt owns a vineyard at
Balhannah. I promised her I’d help her prune it this weekend. It means I get to
stay with her for a week or so. Rent-free. I think of it like a working
holiday.”
“So you’re squatting. What’s
that got to do with me?”
“I’ve never pruned a grapevine
in my life. If you’ll help me, I’ll take your ten grand and I’ll sell you the
Ducati to make up the difference.”
The handbag slipped silently
from her shoulder and stuck in the crease in her elbow, where it swung like a
fisherman’s net. “That’s nuts. That’s paying me, like, fifteen hundred dollars
for two days work.”
“It’s not so nuts,” he said,
echoing her use of the word, watching hunger flare on her face.
“Why?”
“I’d have to pay someone to
give me a pruning demonstration. It might as well be you. This way I get your
labour for the weekend too. It’s less work for me.”
“It’s very damn generous.” She
shifted her weight uneasily and he knew she was looking for a catch. She bit
her lip, chewed at it for a second. “You’re kidding, right? It’s a joke?”
“No joke. I’m serious.”
“How big is the vineyard? One
paddock? Two?”
He tried to picture his aunt’s
vines in his head. Until this week he’d never paid them much attention. “Maybe
not quite two.”
She sucked in a quick breath
that hissed through her teeth, and when she exhaled it was more like a shudder.
“You, Owen Carson, have got yourself a deal.”
“Excellent.” Owen stepped
forward. He plucked the strap from her fingers and laid it gently against her
neck, brushing her soft dark hair out from under the fabric so it wouldn’t
pinch.
This holiday weekend had just
got far more exciting
.
“Hello?” Liv called into her
parents’ empty house—ten minutes after finishing the most illogical
conversation she’d had in… forever. Was it really possible she still had a
chance to buy back the Duke?
She shut the front door behind
her, leant back on the frosted glass, and let out the
squeee
she’d held
since Owen said: see you Saturday.
She sniffed. Thursday night
was usually roast night, but she couldn’t smell rosemary or lamb. She couldn’t
smell anything except the delicious scent of an empty house.
Four nights on her own.
Hallelujah.
Liv skip-limped up the hall,
rubber soles squeaking on polished alabaster tiles. She tossed her handbag at
the pristine white slab of her mother’s new kitchen bench—a colour the salesman
called ‘milk and honey’ and Liv called ‘old wax.’ She ran a finger over the
smooth bevelled edge, promising it four sticky days of fingerprints and toast
crumbs. Possibly even a trespassing ant.
Her mobile phone rang as she
was about to open the fridge.
Ben.
Liv leapt for her handbag and
dredged-up her phone.
“Hi.” She set her hip against
the bench, trying to take the weight off her sore leg.
Her mother’s bird prints eyed
her from the lounge-room wall. Not one print,
four,
suspended in a
framed strip. Wren. Robin. Finch. Shrike. They had beady bright birdie eyes
that seemed to follow her wherever she went.
“If you keep all the boys
waiting this long for a simple phone call, Olivia Murphy, it’s no wonder you
can’t get laid,” Ben greeted her.
“It’s not easy getting laid
under your parents’ roof,” she said, ear ringing from the outraged shrill in
Ben’s voice.
“Then get a little more
inventive, darl.”
“Give it a rest, Ben. I was
just about to call you. Can you believe my folks are gone? They’re in Melbourne
all long weekend. I never thought mum could do it.” The best way to distract
Ben from harping on about her lack of a love life was to mention her parents.
“Old Mrs Bleach must be
improving.” Ben snorted delicately—Liv knew no other person who could make a
snort sound delicate—then he added: “What about Fireman Jack?”
“Dad’s had this weekend
blocked out since they released the football fixture. Adelaide could burn to
the ground and he wouldn’t rush back to save it, although if the Crows don’t
win Saturday he might come home early. He’s a bear with a sore head when they
lose—”
“He’s a bear with a sore head,
period.”
“Give him a break, Ben.”
Ben snorted again. “You’re
defending him?”
“I guess I am.” She’d grown
closer to her father since Christmas. They’d both had to work together to look
after her mother—stop Alison Murphy from turning the house into an
advertisement for bleach. “Dad would change a lot of things if he could.”
“Wasn’t that always his
problem? He kept trying to change the things that should have been left well
enough alone.” Three years of pain crippled Ben’s tone. Or was it four? The
last year Luke and Ben were together was the year her father made Luke sell the
Duke. Nothing was ever the same after that.
She understood how Ben felt,
but Liv kept her voice flat. She didn’t have the energy for a rerun of this
conversation anymore. “Ben Trencher, when we go on this goodbye ride on Monday
that’s it.
Finished.
You’ve got to let what happened go and move on.”
“I miss him every day, Liv. I
wasn’t there at the end. At the hospital. He must have been so scared.”
This time she couldn’t help
but soften. Ben’s voice hit her right between the ribs. “He’d gone, hon. He was
just a shell living through tubes.
You
were the last of us to see him
alive. Treasure that.”
“Hold on, darl, I have to
blow.”
Liv heard the trumpet as Ben
blew his nose. He was back seconds later. “Sorry about that.”
“You’ll make your eyes all
puffy.”
“No sweetling. I always look
fabulous.”
That cracked them both up and
when she’d finished laughing, Liv felt better.
Ben spoke first. “So… did
those Langs look after our bike? How does it ride?”
“I don’t have the Duke yet.”
“What?
Why?
”
She could picture him
scrambling from his computer desk to his feet, knocking calculator and pens and
coffee cups flying. Ben traded swings on the ASX. He spent most days glued to
computer charts filled with more arrows than a target tree in Sherwood Forest.
“A guy called Owen pretty much
paid Lang’s asking price. Almost twelve thousand dollars. I couldn’t match it.”
After a beat, Ben said: “How
are we riding to Mannum together if we don’t have the Duke? No offence, darl,
but the two of us riding pillion on my Honda cramps my style.”
Liv giggled. She wasn’t
usually a giggler and the sound felt strange in her ears. “Are you ready for
the good news?”
“Ready and set.”
“Owen said if I help him prune
his aunt’s vineyard, he’ll sell me the Duke at the end of the weekend.”
The phone was silent until Ben
said: “Have you been into your mother’s cooking sherry since you got home,
Olivia? I’m not following this at
all
.”
“If I help this guy prune his
aunt’s vineyard this weekend, he’ll sell me the Ducati for the ten grand I
would have given Dean Lang. I guess that means he’s paying me fifteen hundred
for the pruning.”
“Your boy sounds like quite
the salesman. So what’s he like?”
The question caught her off
guard.
What was Owen like?
Liv closed her eyes to block out the beady-eyed
birds so she could concentrate. “He’s impulsive. Impetuous.”
“Ooh.
Impressive.
”
“And impatient. And pushy.”
“I
like
him. Liv, he
completes
you.”
“You’re a bloody hopeless
case, you know that? This isn’t
Jerry Maguire,
and Owen is
so
not
my type.”
“Great. Your type sucks. I
couldn’t handle another bank johnny like that last one.
Andy.
”
Liv blew an exasperated sigh.
“It was
Aiden.
And he was in a band. I liked his sensitive side.”
“It was a
marching
band, Liv,” Ben said. “What else about Owen? Give me details.”
“He leapt the school fence in
a single bound.”
“He what? Why did he leap the
school fence?”
“Well, I was on the swing.
No—hold on. I was on the flying fox.”
“And you think
he’s
impulsive. Darl, why were you on the flying fox?”
“Why was I—?” Liv waved the
hand not holding the phone. “Who cares?”
Ben’s snort was less delicate
this time. “So what does he
look
like?”
Liv opened her eyes. “He has
great arms. You’d like them.”
“So he’s do-able then?”
The robin’s unblinking black
eye stared into hers. Liv tucked the phone between her shoulder and her chin
and limped around the bench to fill a glass with water. Her hip ached, her knee
stung, and whether Owen Carson was ‘do-able’ or not, was hardly Ben’s business.
Or that bloody robin’s.
“O-liv-
ia
?” Ben sang.
“Don’t avoid the question.”
She took a long sip of water
chilled enough to hurt her teeth and ditched the rest in the sink. “
Yes.
I’d say Owen Carson’s eminently do-able.
Please
tell me I didn’t just
hear you clap?”
“I’ll
so
want to the
details in Mannum on Monday.” He sounded delighted.
“Ten o’clock here, Ben. See
you then.”
“Ciao, Bella.”
Liv hung up the phone and
returned to the fridge. Her mother had left a container with a neat ‘Thursday’
type-written label on the top beside three matching containers labelled equally
neatly: Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Liv put Thursday’s
meal—split-pea soup—in the microwave and, once it was hot, defrosted a bread
roll.
She could have cleaned up the
plates after dinner, but she took a long relaxing bath instead. The dishes she
left piled in the sink.
Friday morning dawned mushy,
shrouded in a grey fog that didn’t lift until late. It didn’t really matter
because even though she’d told Owen she’d work, all Liv did with the day was
sloth about in her pyjamas in front of daytime television, leaving coffee-cup
rings on the sink. Days in this house without her mother looking over her
shoulder were gold and that meant taking soil samples in Ned Paech’s patch of
Shiraz could wait.
Liv went to bed early, but it
took hours before she fell asleep and when she did, her dreams were filled with
a slideshow of vineyards, motorbikes, and big hands clicking secateurs.
When she woke, more of the
same mushy grey fog lapped at her bedroom window. It didn’t take Liv long to
throw on her work gear: jeans, a fleecy shirt and the warmest jacket she owned.
After strong coffee and toast, she left the house at seven-thirty.
The Margaret’s Folly sign was
right where Owen said it would be and Liv swung her Hyundai hard left off the
bitumen. A line of gums stood either side of the road, branches arching
overhead to meet in a eucalypt tunnel. Gravel crunched beneath the tyres. Rain
overnight had made the track slippery and she drove carefully, eyes on the
vines to her left.
As first impressions go, hers
were positive. The vineyard looked cared for, neatly fenced. Those trellis
posts she could see were in good condition, grey and weathered, but solid. In a
sea of vines, a single, massive tree stood—an elm maybe or some kind of
oak—branches bare and outlined against the sky.
Liv eased a sigh of relief.
The vines had been mechanically pruned and that would make her job so much
easier. Two days to get through about, oh, seven or eight hectares she
estimated. Two, maybe three people if his aunt worked with them too... it
seemed very do-able.
Eminently do-able.
Abruptly, the Hyundai felt
rather hot inside. Liv buzzed the window down and wondered at the sudden
frantic bounce of her heart. There was no good reason why the thought of
spending a weekend elbow to elbow with Owen Carson in a vineyard should make
her blush.
The driveway gained gentle
elevation toward an old stone farmhouse with wide bullnose verandas and at
least three chimneys, one of which lazily puffed smoke. A pair of camellia
trees in full bloom stood either side of the steps: one pink, one white. Each
tree had a skirt of spent flowers strewn at its base.