The Grey Army did a stalwart job of tearing up the kitchen lino. It was tough physical work. Doug turned purple and breathless a couple of times. He insisted he’d be right after a sit-down in the sun and an egg sandwich.
The stone floor revealed itself in handsome slabs. Though it was grey, Ken insisted it was blue, mined from a local quarry. She shrugged his colour blindness off as an example of Lucky Country optimism.
After it was scrubbed and sealed, Lisa and her trio of handymen stood in silence, admiring the work of the craftsmen who’d laid the stone more than a century earlier. They would have arrived on claustrophobic wooden boats propelled by canvas, possibly even in chains. Exiled by Queen Victoria, they’d brought little more with them than their skills.
Lisa could hardly contain her excitement the day a new oven was installed alongside the old wood burner. A name she couldn’t pronounce was etched into its stainless-steel front. It would have to be her last big expenditure until the next royalty cheque. Pale-blue flames rose from the hob with breathtaking obedience while the oven fan whirred.
The next day she baked a brilliant carrot cake and smothered it with cream-cheese icing. In an uncharacteristic act of frivolity, she dribbled a heart shape on top. Then she lowered it onto one of Aunt Caroline’s plates and ferried it across the road to the neighbours’ gate. She hesitated beside the Wright’s letterbox. NO JUNK MAIL was scrawled across it in red paint.
Gathering her nerve she made her way down the dirt driveway. A weatherboard cottage crouched in a grotto of pines. The bones of an old Holden rusted under a makeshift carport.
As she climbed the steps to the front veranda, Aunt Caroline’s voice boomed inside her head: Never appear unannounced at a front door. People will think you’re presumptuous. On a casual visit it’s more polite to announce your presence at the back.
Lisa walked down the side of the house. A shadow moved inside a window. She sidestepped an empty birdbath, a cactus plant and a poinsettia shrivelling in a pot. A row of large women’s knickers drooped from the clothesline.
She tapped on the frosted glass. Silence. The old couple’s hearing was probably off. She rapped more assertively. ‘Are you there, Mr and Mrs Wright?’
There was a furtive thud on the other side of the door.
‘It’s Lisa Trumperton from across the road. I just thought I’d drop by.’
Nothing. She coughed. The pine trees shooshed. A breeze set a shirt moving on the clothesline. Its sleeves seemed to be warding her off.
‘Oh well,’ Lisa said loudly enough to be heard through the door. ‘I’ll just leave this here.’ She lowered the cake onto the concrete step. As she hurried back up the driveway, she could swear she was being watched.
She arrived back at Trumperton feeling spooked. An urge to get away overcame her. She climbed into Dino and drove into town. She needed to go to the supermarket, anyway.
As she was wheeling her trolley down the aisle, ahead of her, a couple in their mid-fifties bickered. ‘When I said corn I meant fresh corn, not this frozen muck!’ the woman snarled.
The man scurried back to the freezer like an obliging retriever.
It made her think: had Jake done her a favour? Maybe people weren’t designed to stay married for a lifetime.
She turned into the pet-food aisle. Supreme Imperial Kitty Treats were on special. She turned a can of Tuna & Prawn in her hand. It looked appetising enough to spread on crackers and serve to her non-existent friends. But the manufacturer was ahead of her—‘Not for Human Consumption’. She placed it back on the shelf.
Although her relationship with Skinnymeals was officially over, thanks to the new oven, she tossed one last Boeuf Wellington de Luxe into the trolley just in case, followed by toilet paper, protein bars (she’d half-hoped they hadn’t made it to Australia), biscuits, eggs and special treats to hide from herself when she got home. As she was about to head for the checkout, something drew her back to the pet-food aisle. A can of Supreme Imperial Kitty Treats tumbled into her trolley. She added three more.
After she’d loaded the supermarket bags into the back of Dino, she wandered over to Togs for a latte.
There she noticed a new addition to the community noticeboard. The Women’s Monthly Book Club was looking for new members. While a few people had started recognising her and saying hello, she was a long way from being embedded. Perhaps joining the local book club would help. She tapped the number into her phone contact list.
On the drive home, she felt the magnetic pull of the garden centre. Hundreds of plants would be needed to make any impact on the front paddock. Still, there was no harm looking . . .
A pretty woman, probably in her early thirties, with a crest of purple hair and a nose stud, was aiming a hose at a forest of camellias. ‘Can I help you?’ the woman asked.
Lisa noticed the woman’s alabaster skin and eyes the colour of Sri Lankan sapphires. ‘Just looking.’
‘You’re new to the district, aren’t you?’ the woman said, lowering her hose and offering a hand. ‘I’m Juliet Fry. Sing out if you need me.’
Lisa thanked her and wandered down an aisle of gardenias. But any attempt to create the English garden that Trumperton’s first owners longed for would be futile. So Lisa made a beeline for the Drought Resistant section, where coppery succulents spilled out of their tubs, and green rosettes tipped with purple clustered alongside vivid yellow fingers. The colours were astonishing.
‘Wait till you see them in flower.’ The voice emanated from a giant cactus.
Lisa peered around the spikes.
Teeth white as pumice glowed back at her. ‘I wouldn’t shop here,’ Scott said. ‘Not at these prices. I buy wholesale.’
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘Keeping an eye on trends,’ he said. ‘Not that Juliet’s going to set the world on fire with these things.’ He stepped through a cluster of tiny imitation Swiss chalets with perches for front doors. ‘These’d look good at your place,’ he said, lifting a pot of fleshy leaves, each ending in a point. ‘Agaves do well here. They’re from Mexico.’ He turned the plant in his large bronze hands.
‘Is it a cactus?’ she asked.
‘More of an aloe. No prickles. Good for the grandchil . . .’
Lisa wondered why Scott’s mouth wasn’t stretched from the number of times he’d put his boot in it. He was too tanned for her to tell if he was blushing.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she sighed. ‘Gay people can have kids these days.’
His eyes crinkled into a smile. ‘I’ve been thinking about that front paddock of yours. You could do great things with mass planting.’
‘It would have to be low-maintenance. I don’t want to spend the next twenty years chained to a lawnmower.’
‘Goes without saying.’ He scratched his chin. ‘We could bring in some boulders to give it structure, then create avenues of native trees and grasses. Have you got a pen?’
Lisa fumbled in her handbag, but it was a writer’s curse to never have a pen.
Scott loped over to the woman watering the camellias and returned beaming. ‘Paper?’
She handed him the supermarket receipt.
‘Anything bigger?’
She dug out a fresh tissue.
‘Here’s the house,’ he said, drawing a line at the edge of the tissue. We’d arrange the boulders around the edge of the property like this. The effect would be informal, very Australian. We’d hang onto most of the trees and natives to keep the local wildlife happy—clumps of kangaroo paw here along this path . . .’ He etched a line curved from the front of the house to form a rough circle inside the ring of boulders. ‘Every garden needs a secret,’ he said, drawing a branch off the main path into the top right-hand corner. ‘From the house and the road, it would look like just a clump of trees. But if you were in the garden, this little path would curve off here, into the bush, see? It would draw you in. You’d turn this corner and find—I dunno . . . an outdoor spa tucked away under a pergola.’
The man was a genius.
‘You mean pergola,’ Lisa said.
‘That’s what I said.’
‘No, you didn’t. You said. Pergola. You’re confusing it with pagoda, which is pronounced the way you were saying pergola.’
‘What are you, a school teacher?’
‘Sorry, no. I write books.’
‘Like Dan Brown?’
‘Not exactly.’
Their conversation had meandered off on a side path of its own, not nearly as magical as the one he’d just described.
‘And the paths? What are they made of?’ she asked, trying to claw back his vision.
‘Just gravel with weed mats underneath.’
Whatever controlled her body heat had lost its switch-off mechanism.
‘Good time of year for planting,’ he added offhandedly.
Lisa shook herself into reality. ‘Yes, but the cost.’
‘No pressure,’ he said, squinting into the sun. ‘I could leave equipment in your stables and do it in stages, if you like.’
‘Which reminds me. You didn’t leave an invoice.’
He blinked. ‘For the other day?’ he said after a pause. ‘Just think of it as a welcome present.’
She thanked him. Her temperature was starting to return to normal. ‘Your ideas are great,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I like cactus plants the way I like women,’ he grinned. ‘Prickly on the outside, but squishy on the inside.’ He nudged his boot against a fountain into which a concrete cherub was peeing. ‘Have you heard about the fundraiser at the town hall next Saturday? It’s for spinal injuries . . .’
A charity event. Turning it down would risk being ostracised.
‘Want to come along and meet some locals?’
‘I’d love to,’ Lisa lied. ‘Is it a trivia night?’
‘Bush dance.’
Oh god. Happy couples, drunken strangers, some weird form of dancing. ‘You mean line dancing?’
‘Easier than that. There’s a caller who tells you what to do. Everyone muddles through.’
Lisa cast around desperately for an excuse. Oven cleaning? Too soon. Besides, her new stove had some kind of self-cleaning thingie. Work? Only a tragic would slave over a computer on a Saturday night.
‘No need to be shy. I’ll pick you up. Say around seven?’
‘What should I wear?’
‘Something comfortable.’
Gripping the steering wheel on her way home, Lisa’s head spun with visions of the paddock transformed into a blaze of colour. She imagined following the secret path to a pool shimmering under a pergola dripping with grapes. Her conscious mind wanted it to stop there, but the reptilian quarter went into overdrive. It envisaged a semi-naked Scott rising from the water and shaking his torso in the sunshine.
As she turned into her driveway, she laughed at her stupidity. Still, it was good to know her hormones hadn’t shrivelled up completely. The other business was altogether more worrying. Had he tricked her into what could be a date? Surely not. She was at least five years his senior. He was just offering country hospitality.
She parked Dino outside the stables, and spotted a familiar shape on the doorstep. With his back to her, the cat was bent in concentration, his tail pointed skyward. She prayed he hadn’t brought another rat.
She opened the driver’s door and called gently.
He swivelled and stared unblinkingly at her through the eye. Then he tensed and raised his front paw, preparing to make a run.
‘It’s okay, puss.’ She stood still while the cat assessed her sincerity.
She needed a friend. So, from the look of it, did he.
The cat put his head down and reverted to his previous task of licking the icing heart off the carrot cake. Someone had returned it and left it on her back doorstep without even a note.