It was at a charity store that Aida found her first pair of hiking boots.
Tucked on a rickety shelf alongside a pile of deflated old handbags, the boots appeared barely worn. They looked sturdy, with high sides and thick tread. Aida picked the boots off the shelf, strangely compelled to try them on, and was amused when they fit.
At first, Aida took walks up past the cemetery, into the farm land beyond. She strolled the dirt tracks between paddocks, jumped fences to search for platypus in creeks. Then she began taking the bus into the hills to explore different bush tracks – the waterfalls about Mt Lofty, the Devil’s Nose lookout, the scrubby gullies of Warren Tower. Packing a backpack with water and a sandwich, she would be gone for hours.
Leaving Gawler on the bus, Aida sometimes noticed certain familiar faces. A few other people – a couple of older men, another young woman – had the same enthusiasm as her for hiking through scrub. Eventually, they formed an unofficial group. The Bushwalkers of Gawler, they called themselves – affectionately shortening it to the BOGs.
The BOGs met one Sunday a month, regardless of the weather, and hiked through conservation parks, old goldfields, along meandering dry creek beds, up and down hills. Aida would return home glowing with ruddy skin, shreds of paperbark in her hair and kangaroo poo ground into the tread of her boots.
While they hiked, the BOGs didn’t talk a lot. After a polite, friendly catch-up at the rendezvous point, they would strike off up the track, each choosing their own pace, yards lengthening out pleasantly between them as they brushed past acacias, climbed sandstone outcrops, spiked their clothes on thickets of flame heath. Companionable solitude. For Aida, it was perfect.
And then one Sunday, as the BOGs stood catching their breath on an escarpment overlooking the Hale Conservation Park, one of Aida’s fellow walkers, Jerry Southam, turned to Aida and said, ‘Did I hear you say you lived on Church Street?’
Aida nodded and took a swig from her canteen.
‘My mother lives a couple of blocks away from you, I reckon.’
That is how Aida came to know Grace Southam, sixty-eight years old, divorcée, and the first outside person to whom Aida would tell everything.
*
Jerry Southam’s mother had twisted her knee. Though Jerry could operate her washing machine, and pick up milk and bread from the store, he couldn’t cook for his mother. At the stove, Jerry was worse than useless.
‘Toast,’ he laughed sheepishly. ‘I can manage toast.’ And while Jerry’s wife was an excellent cook, the younger Mrs Southam had refused to provide one morsel of her fare to her mother-in-law due to some ongoing, long-standing feud.
‘I don’t even know what it’s about,’ Jerry said, morosely. ‘But she won’t cook a crumb for Mum – and even if she did, Mum wouldn’t touch it. Thinks it would be laced with arsenic.’
The first meal Aida prepared for Grace Southam was a lamb and barley casserole. Next, she roasted chicken drumsticks with lemon and herbs. When Aida made a Shepherd’s pie, Grace Southam, holed up in her armchair with her foot propped on the ottoman, cigarette smoke haloing her head, had remarked about Aida’s last name, and said, ‘I once dated a Shepherd.’
Aida gulped her tea, hoping Mrs Southam wouldn’t ask about relatives.
‘Not the name, dear,’ Mrs Southam added. ‘You needn’t look so frightened. A shepherd, as in, a man who keeps sheep.’
‘Oh,’ Aida said, relieved.
‘It didn’t last. I’m pretty sure he liked his sheep more than he liked women, if you know what I mean.’
Tea spurted from Aida’s nose and across the coffee table. Choking and coughing, Aida struggled to regain her breath while Mrs Southam howled with a laughter.
Even after the older lady’s knee healed and she was able to shuffle around, Aida kept visiting. She found Mrs Southam fascinating, and a delight: forthright, wilful, worldly. Grace Southam had worked as a house-maid, a telephonist, a post-mistress. Married twice, she had been widowed once (the war), and divorced the second one. ‘Turns out he was bedding anything with legs,’ she said. Grace Southam had courted diplomats, soldiers, police officers and even, once, a circus acrobat. Her daughter had run off to Western Australia with a pearl diver. She had lost a baby to croup. ‘I have a history longer than the Queen,’ she said. But despite all that, she wanted to finish up here, in the suburbs, close to her son. Even if his wife was a cranky bitch.
‘What about you, dear?’ Mrs Southam asked. ‘Those eyes are too pretty not to have a past.’
Slowly, haltingly, Aida told her. Jimmy, her baby. Elsie, beloved, and Thomas. The inexplicable three. Her parents, gone. Darling Millicent and Arthur, whom Aida loved like a mother does. Their quietude, their secrecy and hiding. And when she finished by saying, ‘Please don’t tell Jerry,’ Mrs Southam took her hands, looked her in the eye and said she would never betray a woman. Aida knew it was true.
‘Besides,’ the older lady said, ‘He still believes his father was the one I married, bless him.’