‘Where are we?’ Matilda asked from her booster in the back seat. ‘Are we lost, Mummy?’
Paige glanced at her daughter in the rear-view mirror, and with the lie like a sour lolly she couldn’t hold in, said, ‘Of course we’re not lost. The trip is taking a little longer than I expected.’
Why with every iPhone app at her fingertips had Paige not thought to check the driving conditions before leaving the house? On the road since dawn, the trio had hit one delay after another. An earlier overturned semi-trailer on the motorway north of Gosford, its payload of packaged peanuts strewn across all northbound lanes, had them well behind schedule and suffering the mid-summer temperatures, with only occasional blasts of air-con to save fuel. Not even Paige’s impromptu stand-up routine, telling the family’s favourite peanut jokes, had lifted her travel companions’ spirits at the time.
Perhaps she could have checked the weather, too. According to the radio’s weatherman just now, the week would bring ‘perfect blue and cloudless skies to northeast NSW’.
Perfect for lying on a beach somewhere and sipping cocktails maybe?
If Paige had listened to Alice—the woman refusing to look anywhere but out the car’s side passenger window, sighing with exasperation for the tenth time in as many minutes—they might well be looking forward to spending the rest of January in the cool comfort of a beach resort. Instead, at the height of summer, Paige was headed for a hot, dusty country town to constant cries from the backseat of: ‘Are we there yet, Mummy?’
Maybe they could have taken the inland highway, Paige added to her musings and the mental list of what ifs forming as mid-afternoon passed and dark, grey clouds thickened overhead, hanging what seemed mere metres from the roof of Paige’s Audi station wagon. In fact, she could have sworn one cloud had trailed them all the way from the highway turnoff two hours ago.
Now rain.
Perfect! Not the weather, but the perfect time to stop, to clean the windscreen, to refuel—the car, the crabby companion, the kid—and hopefully make their destination before sundown. Maybe she should have thought about doing all those things at the last roadhouse, as such establishments had been sparse since. They’d driven past a couple of side roads with signs showing the little petrol bowser icon, although the last arrow had been bent perpendicular so that it pointed to the sky. The Audi fuel gauge was showing a quarter full and the fancy trip calculator told her she was good for another 150 kilometres. Paige wasn’t convinced though, and with such mountainous terrain so far from typical highway driving conditions, they’d been going through fuel fast.
The steep road had narrowed ten minutes ago, her daughter blissfully quiet for a change, engrossed in the Disney DVD of the moment; one of three Santa presents left in her stocking. Paige tried tuning out the occasional I-told-you-so stare from the adjacent passenger seat; a look she undoubtedly deserved as her doggedness was what had got them all to this point.
Lost!
Of course, she could shift the blame for their current predicament to Robert. The state of her marriage did seem to be trending—had been for some time. Only the word trending implied the subject was being discussed. She and Robert didn’t talk so much of late about anything other than his work that kept him out late, or his sport that kept him away all weekend. As a result, Paige hadn’t even mentioned the man at the shopping mall six weeks ago, the unmistakable desperation in the stranger’s embrace pressed into Paige’s memory, as well as the heart-rending, rueful expression once he’d realised his mistake.
‘I’d call you by your name, but I don’t know what it is,’ the man had said, handing Paige a business card. ‘Please, take this. Maybe I can buy you a coffee one day to apologise and explain.’
With a trace of guilt, as if someone was handing her a note in class with the answers to the test, Paige had offered a cursory glance before banishing the card to the abyss of her shoulder bag.
‘You’ve apologised enough,’ she said, her voice tinged with equal parts sympathy and suspicion. ‘Let’s not make this any weirder than it is already, okay?’
His big, broad smile seemed genuinely curious. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean?’
‘Business cards? Coffee? Trying to be friends?’ she explained. ‘We’re not. We’re strangers. Strangers who happened to . . . Never mind.’
The incident, blown out of proportion by an overly officious security guard with latent local hero aspirations, had already taken up thirty precious minutes. Mati would be waiting outside the school and Paige couldn’t be late. Only yesterday she’d endured one of Alice’s ‘What’s the world coming to?’ sermons, then an Alice lecture about stranger danger and after-school safety.
‘Wait!’ The stranger in the mall had called to her as she left the Centre Management offices. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’
Paige cast a curt glance over one shoulder as she limped away. ‘That you thought I was your long lost love? In a word, no.’
Chance meetings? Long lost loves? They only happened in movies and books. Real life for Paige Turner was anything but thrilling, despite the facade of a busy social calendar and a privileged life in Sydney with her high-flyer husband and Matilda, their six-year-old daughter. But the incident that December day—a coffee at Gloria Jeans, a busy shopping mall, and an intensely remorseful man overwhelmed by the tragedy of unrequited love—had brought Paige’s own discontent into the light.
Perhaps not telling Robert about that incident straightaway had added to the mystery and excitement of having an exotic stranger embrace her enthusiastically, even if it was in the middle of a shopping mall. Had the encounter taken place anywhere else, without Paige hitting the deck when her dodgy leg gave way, and without the over-zealous security guard witnessing the incident, she was sure they’d have sorted the matter of mistaken identity quickly and without fuss. But the heart-attack-waiting-to-happen guard with the halitosis and sweat-stained shirt, whose highly visible presence was probably meant to reassure shoppers following a recent south Sydney shopping mall shooting, said he had—quote—‘witnessed the suspicious behaviour’, reporting it as such to Centre Management.
A few days later, after school the drop-off and yet to tell her husband, Paige had the urge to tell Jane Lowy, mother of six-year-old Samuel whose name was popping up in her daughter’s distinctive scribble on various schoolbooks.
Paige caught up with her as she waited on the side of the road with the safety supervisor. ‘Time for a coffee this morning?’ she asked as Jane paused briefly in the middle of the road to bend the flexible arm of the pram’s sunshade, much to the disapproval of the school crossing attendant. Although barely summer, with the school bell yet to ring for the start of class, the December sun bore down with sinister intensity.
‘Always time for coffee.’
‘Sure is steamy after last night’s rain,’ Paige said, happy to discuss the weather until the pair was settled at an inside table directly under one of two overhead ceiling fans.
Jane coochee-cooed the baby, removed the pink dummy, and shoved a bottle between its rosebud lips before exhaling loudly, as if dropping her small son off at school and pacifying a happy baby was an exhausting chore. For a fleeting moment the thought gave Paige an ache in her heart where there should have been joy—if only . . .
After ordering their drinks, Paige launched into her story. ‘The weirdest thing happened at the mall . . .’
Wide-eyed for the entire account, Jane eventually giggled. ‘Oh, he sounds very mysterious. Why don’t exciting things happen to me? Gosh, I’d be going back there every day. A kind of Brief Encounter, only without the train.’
More like Scenes from a Mall, only not so Woody Allen, Paige was tempted to say, but comparing her home life to a Hollywood rom-com about infidelity would be letting out too much information about the state of her marriage; Jane wasn’t that good a friend. Instead, she asked to burp the baby and Jane—somewhat reluctantly in Paige’s estimation—handed over the small, tightly wrapped bundle. Again, she and Jane weren’t exactly friends.
Genuine friendship had evaded Paige, and any professional relationships she’d once enjoyed at work fizzled out when she’d relocated the family, the distance leaving most friends unable, or perhaps unwilling, to overcome the seemingly insurmountable divide between the trendy inner city and the outer-Sydney suburbs. Home for the Turners in the city’s northern gateway of Berowra could hardly be more outer-Sydney. Paige had been the one to insist they find a nice, leafy area. Somewhere safe. Somewhere that would allow Mati space and independence, while allowing an over-protective Paige to let go a little. As tempted as she was, and despite the recurring nightmares, Paige refused to become one of those mothers who clung so tight that something as simple as an acquaintance burping a baby was viewed with caution.
Sometimes she tried to tell Robert how the bad dreams made her feel—like someone was tearing her baby from her arms and as hard as she might try to hold on she’d lose her grip and the baby would disappear into the darkness.
‘More like losing your grip on reality,’ Robert would tell her. ‘They’re dreams, Paige. The doctors said they’ll go away. I appreciate it must be hard. Losing a baby like we did is hard on me too, you know, but life goes on, hon. You have to try harder. Time to let go.’
The problem was, Paige didn’t want to let go. As terrifying as the nightmares were, for a brief moment each time, they let her experience the joy of holding the baby she’d lost.
Now she was stuck in a kind of limbo, no longer good enough for the job she’d loved—Food Editor with Going Gourmet Magazine—and no good at the dutiful wife and stay-at-home-mum thing. There was her poorly paid, part-time distraction with a national food company, although she couldn’t call blogging about processed food a real job. At least the weekly deadline stopped her going mad, even though working from home was much the same as being invisible. The once outgoing and unstoppable city executive was living in her husband’s shadow and blaming him for her lot in life.
If Paige was honest with herself about her so-called brief encounter at the mall, she would admit that the notion of a sensitive stranger accosting her had added a thrill she’d missed since her illness. The man who spoke with broken English, his shiny white teeth set against dark skin, had been so sweet, so beguiling, so mysterious, Paige had hardly noticed the pain in her ankle until much later. The sad thing was, her husband hadn’t noticed her exaggerated limp that night at all. Keeping news of the dalliance from Robert had meant enjoying the mischievous feeling for a few days longer, before the monotony and predictability of life for Paige Turner took over again.
The irony! Why had she not kept the surname Foster when marrying Robert? Life for her these days was so not a page-turner.
‘Oh my gosh, Paige, look what my little monster has done.’ Jane ripped three moist towelettes from the bag hanging on the back of the pram before lunging across the café table, sending a rush of panic through Paige.
‘What? What’s wrong?’
‘Can you not smell that?’ Jane asked, shoving the towelettes at her before retrieving the baby and settling her back in the pram. ‘Sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing differently with this one but . . . Phew! Samuel’s puke never smelled this bad. I guess it’s this crazy heat. Now there’s something else we can blame on global warming and the government. Smelly puke!’ Jane laughed and resumed her coochee-cooing.
Paige used several serviettes to scrape the regurgitated baby goop from the collar of her shirt and with a subtle breath in through her nose hoped for a miracle. Nothing. She couldn’t smell a thing: not the freshly ground coffee beans as the barista’s grinder muted the café’s conversation, not the next table’s French toast stacked high with grilled banana and bacon, lashings of maple syrup spilling sensually onto the plate, not the exhaust from the car idling at the kerb, the driver oblivious to the exaggerated coughs and splutters of sidewalk diners. Sometimes, if she tried really hard, Paige’s brain could conjure up the memory of Matilda’s baby smells, but even that was becoming a test for her imagination.
‘You seem distracted,’ Alice said from the passenger seat, jerking Paige back to the task at hand—delivering three weary road-trippers safely to the quaint-sounding boatshed she’d found on the Internet. ‘You sure I can’t drive for a bit? I’m afraid I’m not very good with these map gadgets.’ The annoying navigation voice on the GPS had long since given up trying to tell Alice where to go.
‘I don’t need a break. You relax. It can’t be too much further.’ Paige tried sounding optimistic, but she was distracted by a thought. That crazy day in the mall last December, amid the pre-Christmas shopping madness, should have been the end of weird for Paige. Instead, weird had grabbed hold, bringing the entire Turner household down with a mysterious bug.
The That’s weird bug.
‘That’s weird,’ Matilda had said a couple of days after the Mall Man incident and mid-way through a mouthful of toast and Vegemite, her favourite breakfast.
‘What’s weird, Mati?’ Paige had asked.
‘Nothing.’
Paige remembered shaking her head at the single word that had become the answer to every enquiry:
What did you do at school today?
Nothing.
What have you got for homework?
Nothing.
What do you want for dinner?
Nothing.
‘So, what do you want to do today?’ Paige asked that morning, ever hopeful.
‘Nana Alice is helping me make coconut ice.’
‘For the end-of-year fete at school? I thought I was helping you.’
‘Nana Alice said you needed to rest and I was to leave you alone.’
‘She did, did she?’ Paige smiled at how adult her daughter sounded whenever she repeated one of Nana Alice’s commandments, which depending on the nature of the diktat annoyed Paige a lot or a little. Still, such niggles seemed insignificant, outweighed by the positives of having Alice so readily at hand, especially these last couple of years; the joy of suburban cul-de-sac living, with only the purpose-built gate in the back fence separating Alice’s house from theirs—although according to Robert, some days not separate enough. ‘Well, you’d best save me some of that coconut ice. I’ll pop over in a few hours for a taste test.’
Mati’s scrunched-up nose and sideways glance mirrored her father’s perpetual smirk, as did her bluntness. ‘You’ll say it’s nice, Mummy. You always say everything’s nice.’ She charged off, running straight into her father’s legs.
‘Whoa, watch where you’re going, gorgeous girl.’ Paige’s husband dashed into the kitchen, dancing around his daughter to avoid Vegemite fingerprints on his new Greg Norman golf pants.
Dashing seemed to be something Robert did a lot of these days. Dashing was also the best way to describe her husband: tall, lean and fitter now than he was in his youth, with wild blond locks he insisted on cultivating, obviously in case cute surfer guy ever became au courant in the bush suburbs. His best features by far were his staggering blue eyes and dark lashes to die for—lashes Paige could picture to this day weighed down with an ocean of sun-dried salt water and glistening in the sun. Years before settling into corporate life, Robert had bummed around on Manly beach getting tanned and buff, surfboard dug into the sand, those impenetrable blond locks repelling water droplets, but not girls. At least Paige thought her husband’s eyes were blue. It had been a long time since she’d seen them.
Twenty years they’d been married. Twenty years that had started with his declaration of forever love one New Year’s Eve and marriage six months later. Forty-five-year-old Robert Turner rarely hit the beach these days, but he was probably still impenetrable to water. He was impenetrable to just about everything else—including his wife.
Paige loaded fresh beans into the in-built espresso machine—the two-thousand dollar one requiring little human intervention, no bean tamping skills, no milk texturing expertise. The over-sized monstrosity had been included with the kitchen renovations she didn’t agree they needed. The sound of coffee beans whizzing around the grinder transported her back to the episode with the sad man outside Gloria Jean’s at the mall. She wondered why she hadn’t found an opportunity to mention the incident to Robert while they routinely brushed their teeth at the his-and-hers bathroom sinks before climbing into bed each night. One night she’d tried, but by the time her husband had finished shaving—shaving at night meant he’d have that perfect, consistently sexy stubble the next day—Paige was already tucked in on her side and lost in the Lisa Heidke novel, Claudia’s Big Break, wishing she could have a big break away of her own. She’d waited until her husband settled against three fluffed-up, feather-filled pillows to read the business section from the morning paper—again—and without rolling over said, ‘Robert . . . ?’
‘Hmm? Sorry, hon, did you say something?’
‘Nothing,’ Paige mumbled into her pillow, marvelling at how much like a sulky six-year-old she suddenly sounded.
Alice looked up from her Sudoku magazine. She started to say something about the roadside flood indicators and Paige pulled her thoughts back to concentrate on the car descending into a small gully with a long, narrow bridge at the bottom. The warped and wiggling boards challenged the Audi’s suspension, the resulting rumble a lot like thunder, startling a noise out of a sleepy Matilda in the back seat. Paige activated the wipers, and with several blasts of water from the jets managed to wash away the dusty film. Last night’s summer rainstorm had been fierce, whipping the bedroom windows and waking Paige in a lather of sweat at 2 am.
Was it the thundering rain?
More likely another nightmare, she thought.
Feeling the familiar sensation of tears forming, Paige turned her face slightly, away from Alice’s scrutiny. Two years had not lessened the devastating loss of her second-born. Telling Robert about her thoughts and the reccurring nightmares no longer helped. According to him, if Paige fell apart she wasn’t coping, and if she kept a tight lid on her emotions she wasn’t coping either; hence the brave face she mastered in company. It stood to reason, once sleep came, all that holding back would be let go, manifesting as thrashing and whimpering, enough to send Robert into the spare room on too many nights. In the mornings, weary and frustrated, her husband would only half listen as she tried to explain the cryptic images and crying babies that had crowded her head at night. As usual, anything not based on fact had little chance of grabbing her husband’s attention away from the day’s stock report.
With a recent dream more confusing than normal, thanks to a cameo appearance by Mr I-Thought-You-Were-Someone-Else from the mall, she’d ambushed Robert at the breakfast table while waiting for the coffee machine to do its thing. A glance out the window and across the yard confirmed Matilda was already safely ensconced in her Nana Alice’s kitchen. The two of them waved back, their ritual to signal Mati’s safe arrival. Soon enough they’d start whipping up the school fete day fare and the thought of coconut snow floating down to rest on Alice’s spotless linoleum floor made Paige smile as she turned to face her husband.
‘Robert, I need to talk to you about something.’
‘What’s that, Paige?’ he asked with a flick of his wrist, his face peering around the edge of the newspaper to check the time on his watch.
She was partway through explaining her interpretation of the dream, and hadn’t even got to Mall Man, when Robert interrupted.
‘So, you’re Australia’s own psychic medium extraordinaire, like the one off that American TV show you watch. A down under Alison Whatshername? I suppose that makes me the flaky, soppy guy who plays the husband, moping around trying to be useful. Next you’re going to tell me Mati’s levitating in her bed at night and seeing dead people. Wooooo, spookeee!’ Robert laughed at his own ridiculous sound effects. ‘Like I’ve said before, Paige, you watch too much television. You need an interest.’
‘I have a job.’
The espresso machine beeped and gurgled.
‘You need something that gets you out of the house.’
Paige couldn’t see his face behind the newspaper so she didn’t know if he was smiling or not. At least he’d heard her. As she removed the tiny espresso cup, the coffee machine beeped, whirred and then robotically spoke the word, ‘En-joy.’
‘I’m trying to talk to you about something that’s troubling me.’
‘If either of you start predicting the stock market, you will give me the heads up, won’t you?’
‘Sometimes, Robert, you can be a real . . .’
‘In fact,’ he continued as if having the conversation all on his own, ‘rather than sit around all day watching TV, if you wanted something to do you could—’
‘I don’t sit around all day, Robert. And stop telling me I watch too much TV.’
‘All I’m saying is Mati’s last newsletter had another call for tuckshop parents. You love food. Why not volunteer a couple of days? They’d be lucky to have someone with your food background.’
‘And feed salmonella sandwiches to the students with off chicken and rancid milk I can’t smell? I don’t believe you’re even making the suggestion. And you know what else?’ Paige drew a deep breath to prepare for her rant and delivered the espresso to the corner dining nook, slamming the coffee cup down hard enough to send a crema geyser into the air.
‘Watch it, Paige!’ Robert brushed his trousers, barely looking away from his paper, but shifting slightly in case any liquid dare spill over the table edge.
‘Newsflash, Robert, you can’t possibly be that Joe character on TV. Soppy or not, at least he knows how to be a husband. He understands his wife, and when he doesn’t he still tries to be supportive and open to the possibility that he doesn’t know everything there is to bloody know.’ Paige punched the centre of the newspaper so hard one edge tore away from his hand.
‘Come on, hon, you’re being ridiculous. I’m joking. Besides it’s make believe. They’re actors on TV.’
‘Then why does their marriage seem more real to me than ours? I wish I was Alison Dubois with a wonderful husband. Instead, I married a bloody newspaper.’ She stormed out of the kitchen and back up to bed, throwing herself down hard, surprised by her own hysterics.
Probably hormones, she thought through tears. At least that’s what Robert would mutter to himself as he picked up his briefcase from the downstairs office, draped his suit coat over one arm and clamped the car keys to the black BMW between his teeth to open the front door. Somewhere about that time he’d think to walk back and kiss his wife’s cheek—keys and all. Only today was Saturday, so instead of a briefcase, it would be a golf bag from the cupboard under the stairs.
‘Paige, honey, I’m sorry. Are you all right? I’ll come straight back after the game and we can talk. Okay? I love you.’ His voice travelled up the stairs, the last three words landing softly on her ears.
She could get up, go downstairs, see her husband off. Rob tried. He worked eighty hours a week, missing out on spending quality time with his daughter. He provided for his family every way he knew how—except emotionally, when Paige needed him the most. But as the front door slammed shut she squeezed her eyes tight and willed sleep to take her away in the knowledge she’d have a couple of hours before needing to be at Alice’s for the promised coconut ice taste-test.
When sleep didn’t come, Paige reverted to her usual habit of counting sheep to a make-believe metronome, which routinely and bizarrely resulted in a Waltzing Matilda earworm—the bit about the jumbucks and the shade of a Coolabah tree.
Then sleep. But not before making a decision.
Getting away for a while with Mati, before she started the new school year, had been a good decision.
A good decision at the time, Paige mused as she steered down another steep hillside to Mati’s complaints from the back seat that she was bored and her ears had popped. They’d left the hairpin bends and high altitude behind and after a final sweeping curve, bordered by a botanical wonderland, the car emerged from the heavily wooded, mountainous descent they’d been travelling for some time. Spreading out before them was a landscape of rolling green hills that in the golden glow of a setting sun were the colour of ripe limes. This was the change of scene she had been hoping for, although with no sign of drought, it was far from the type of countryside Paige had expected from her Internet searches and she could only think . . .
Well, that’s definitely weird!