That evening, Holly opened the door of the Clover Road house to two dark-suited men—a tall thin silent one with a grey ponytail and a shorter, chunkier one who looked as if he spent a lot of time in the gym. The men had an authoritative manner. They didn’t smile. The shorter one asked for Andrew, and seemed unable to believe that he wasn’t at home. He said they would like to check for themselves, if Holly didn’t mind.
Holly did mind, but somehow the men got in anyway. They just eased firmly past her while she stood gaping at them. The search didn’t take long, because there were only two built-in cupboards in the place, if you didn’t count the kitchen.
Holly assumed her visitors were employed by Len Land, Oriana Spillnek, or perhaps the car lease firm, but they refused to tell her anything. She didn’t like the way they looked at her, or at her small encampment on the living room floor, or at the candle stuck into an empty jar that was her only light. They didn’t exactly sneer, but she was sure they would have if she hadn’t watched them closely.
As they left, the shorter one said they would make it worth her while if she told them where Andrew was.
The hair prickling on the back of her neck, she said she couldn’t help him.
Later, lying wrapped in her quilt in the dark, echoing house, trying to will herself to sleep while her stomach gurgled, rebelling against a dinner of gherkins and dry breakfast cereal, Holly began to review the impulses and actions that, step by step, had brought her to this pass.
It was hard to know where to start. Had saying ‘Okay’ to Andrew’s sudden marriage proposal been the beginning? Or had her fate been sealed before that, when she had agreed to have coffee with an attractive man she had met in a shopping queue? Or had the fateful moment occurred that Saturday night just over six months ago, when she had decided to leave Perth and flee to Sydney?
No. The real beginning had been a few months before that, when she had ended her engagement to Lloyd Price, her steady boyfriend of seven long years. All their friends had been shocked by the breakup. In an unpredictable, ever-changing world, Holly and Lloyd had made everyone feel safe. They had been together forever—quite like an old married couple, except that Holly lived in a flat above a dry-cleaner’s shop, and Lloyd still lived with his parents, ‘laying solid foundations’, as he put it, in the firm of solicitors he had joined, and prudently investing his savings against the (unspecified) day when he and Holly would marry.
No one understood how Holly could have made such a rash decision. ‘After all that time!’ people said, as if Holly had left a steady job to join the dole queue just before her long-service leave was due. It seemed to them a mad impulse, and in a way it was, though afterwards Holly realised that trouble had been brewing for quite a while.
The boil-over had happened during the inevitable Sunday lunch at Lloyd’s parents’ place. Holly, who always ate faster than anyone else, and always tried to disguise it, was trying to make a few cooling lamb scraps and half a baked potato last the distance. She was listening absently to Lloyd’s mother telling her about a new way of using up small pieces of soap when she happened to glance at Lloyd and his father, who were amiably discussing their golf handicaps.
She knew perfectly well that Lloyd and his father both ate their Sunday roast dinner in the same way—meat first, potatoes second, pumpkin third and peas (mashed in a small, carefully reserved pool of gravy) last. She had seen the phenomenon often. There had been a time when she had found it endearing. But that day, as she watched the two men mashing their peas in unison, their pleasant, long-nosed faces intent, their snugly cardiganned forearms moving in exactly the same way, their forks making identical little squishy sounds, something in her seemed to snap. It was an actual, physical sensation, accompanied by a small, pinging sound in Holly’s head.
Holly jerked in her chair and for an instant everything swam before her eyes. As her vision cleared, she sat rigidly, fighting the urge to leap to her feet and run. Little chills were streaking up and down her legs, and her knees had started jiggling under the table. She put down her knife and fork and gripped the seat of her chair to hold herself in place.
It was all she could do to wait for the pea ceremony to end, and help serve the apple crumble and low-fat ice cream. She broke out in a sweat as she helped Lloyd’s mother pack the dishwasher while Lloyd and his father took their post-lunch naps in matching chairs in the living room, and racing cars buzzed dully round and round on the TV screen like maddened flies.
But when at last she had made her escape—when Lloyd had driven her home, carefully parked his car outside the dry-cleaner’s shop, remarked, as he always did, that parking was easier here on Sundays as long as you made it by four, and turned to kiss her before she hopped out and trotted back into her weekday box—she said she had something she had to tell him . . .
And there it was, Holly thought now, turning over on the hard floor. At a stroke, she had severed the multiple ties that had bound her to her home, and the life she knew. She had cut herself adrift.
She had explained to her best friend, Angie, and her mother and father, about the fateful Sunday lunch—about the meat, potatoes, pumpkin and peas, and about the cardigans. She had added, for good measure, that Lloyd insisted on reusing teabags so a box of fifty would last twice as long.
Angie looked baffled and said, ‘Oh, right . . .’ Holly’s mother looked worried and said, ‘Well, we’ve all got our little habits, darling.’ Her father thoughtfully chewed his moustache.
They didn’t get it. Possibly they thought Holly was having some kind of breakdown. Holly, on the other hand, knew she had finally come to her senses, and didn’t understand why she hadn’t seen the light years ago. It was all so clear to her now. Like a princess in a fairytale, she had spent seven years in a dream. Now the spell had been broken. Not by a handsome prince’s kiss, but by the squish of one pea too many.
She was free. Life without Lloyd stretched ahead of her, broad and straight and shimmering with possibilities— notably romance, a tall, dark stranger and lots of hot, safe sex. She felt exhilarated, sad, guilty, excited and frightened by turns.
She told her hairdresser she wanted a whole new look, and emerged from the salon with her mouse-brown hair blonded and cut into a gorgeous, tousled, ‘piquant’ style. The style lasted till the first wash, then mysteriously transformed itself into a short bob with a side parting and a bit of wispy fringe, but the blonde look, at least, remained to justify the expense.
Next, beginning as she meant to go on, she bought a very short black skirt, a strapless black corset-style top, high-heeled boots and a red G-string. All were great bargains—less than half-price—and all were fiendishly uncomfortable. It only occurred to Holly afterwards that the two phenomena might be linked.
She began going out a lot, and accepted every invitation, but most of her friends were Lloyd’s friends as well, so this meant that the invitations were mostly for coffee, lunch or a movie with her oldest girlfriends. She had dropped off the party A list. Party givers couldn’t ask both Holly and Lloyd, and Lloyd, as the grieving and bewildered dumpee, had the high moral ground. He was the one who needed support. Besides, an extra single man was always welcome in any gathering, whereas an extra single woman, especially one who was possibly mentally unstable, and who had taken to wearing very short skirts, could be seen as a liability.
Things were also bleak on the romance front. After three months, the only tall, dark strangers who had ridden over Holly’s expanded horizon had turned out to be married, gay, too old, too young, hopelessly neurotic, or not interested. The fair strangers, both short and tall, fell into the same categories. Holly’s only determined approaches came from swarthy men with lecherous eyes and a lot of gold chains, who propositioned her in bars or sidled up to her in the street.
Feeling she might be projecting the wrong image, Holly stopped wearing the short skirt and the corset top. The red G-string was no longer an issue as it had snapped and turned into a sort of lacy sporran on its first chafe-ridden outing. She also let her hair grow out.
Nothing she did made any difference. Suitable handsome strangers continued to be impervious to her charms. Her job at the bank remained as pleasant and uneventful as ever. She took to going to her parents’ place for Sunday lunch. Angie and her other friends kept giving her snippets of news about ‘poor old Lloyd’ over the cheese melts and coffee cups.
And one dreary Saturday night, when at eight-thirty she found herself in dressing gown and slippers, reading the home decorating section of a women’s magazine and seriously considering the suggestion that she paint her fridge with ‘zany zebra stripes’ to brighten up her flat, she realised that dramatic action was required.
So she had sold her laptop computer and bought a plane ticket to Sydney. And met Andrew McNish. And agreed to give up her job and marry him. And ended up here, on the floor of an empty house in Springwood.
Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind, her grandmother sometimes said. Well, so it had proved, Holly thought dismally. Then she remembered that at least she was no longer alone in the storm. She had O’Brien on her side.
One day I’ll laugh about all this, she told herself, and almost believed it.
On Wednesday morning, half crippled from her night on the floor, Holly laboured up to the public phone by the post office and rang O’Brien for a progress report. His phone didn’t answer. On Thursday she rang him twice, with no response. By Friday morning, when still she couldn’t get through to him, she’d had enough.
She was tired of sleeping on bare boards, showering in cold water and poring over the classified ads in the Blue Mountains Gazette by candlelight. (Barista wanted min. 2 yrs exp . . . Farrier, 1st yr apprentice reqrd . . . Maths Tutor . . . Piano Tuner . . . Tuba Player . . . Bantams at point of lay for sale . . . Boost Your Self-Esteem . . . Best Quality Mulch . . . Indulge Your Fantasies! Call Natasha for sexy phone frolics. No Sundays.)
She was tired of applying for jobs without the benefit of email or private phone. She was tired of living on cheese crackers and breakfast cereal, and she never wanted to see a gherkin again. Her face still burned at the memory of trying to sell the goose-shaped biscuit barrel to the kindly woman at the Springwood secondhand shop who had said she was sorry, dear, but it wasn’t their sort of thing, and then asked if she would like to see a social worker. After her last phone call she had exactly thirty-five cents and a New Zealand dollar left in the world, and she was very aware that on Saturday she would no longer have a roof over her head.
Perhaps by now Andrew had spent her money, sold her wedding ring, blown the petty cash. But her determination to find him had not wavered. She had to confront him with what he had done. She wanted to see the expression on his face when he opened his door and found her standing there. If she had to follow him to Darwin, she’d do it.
O’Brien had said he would find him. O’Brien had taken a hundred of her dollars on a promise. Direct action was required.
Holly looked for O’Brien’s card in her wallet and was grimly unsurprised when she couldn’t find it. Rage had engraved his phone number on her memory, so she hadn’t consulted the card since Thursday morning. Either she had lost it since then, or it had disappeared in a puff of smoke. It didn’t matter. She hadn’t really needed to check the address. She remembered it—remembered that shaky writing perfectly.
Made cautious by adversity, she transferred her suitcases, bedding and china goose to the car, just in case Mr Land pounced on the house earlier than expected. Then, gritting her teeth, she set off for 16A Stillwaters Road, Mealey Marshes.
Twenty minutes later, following in the tracks of thousands of ill-fated adventurers before her, Holly was turning off the highway at the small but confident ‘To Mealey Marshes’ sign. The road off the highway began with a flourish but quickly degenerated into a narrow strip of crumbly bitumen. The ‘To Mealey Marshes’ signs, thick on the ground at first, dwindled to nothing, but since there were no side streets, Holly moved on determinedly, certain that eventually Mealey Marshes would be revealed.
The bitumen eventually ducked under the railway line by means of a very low, very narrow underpass. A sign tacked to the blackened stone warned ‘Oncoming Traffic Has Right of Way’, as if the council believed that at any one time many more cars would be trying to leave Mealey Marshes than wanting to enter it.
Beyond the underpass a deserted, unnamed road straggled away to left and right, roughly following the line of the railway track. On one side of the road was a wire-fenced, weedy railway embankment. On the other side was scrubby bush pocked with occasional timber and fibro houses that bore no numbers and showed no sign of life.
Holly took a punt and turned right. This turned out to be a mistake, but as she discovered ten minutes later, turning left wouldn’t have done her much good either. In both directions the road was a snare and a delusion, tempting the driver on by appearing to be going somewhere, then abruptly ending at patches of vine-hung bush and a ‘Dumping Prohibited’ sign surrounded by rusted supermarket trolleys, bald tyres, sodden armchairs and broken slabs of concrete.
Refusing to be defeated, Holly turned the Mazda in to one of the dubious-looking side streets that wandered away from the railway road. The streets all seemed to head downwards, more or less, and she reasoned that as Mealey Marshes was in a valley, it probably didn’t matter much which one she took.
It did, in fact, as she was soon to discover. In no time she was hopelessly lost in a maze of featureless dead-end roads, sweating and cursing as she tried to claw back her usually reliable sense of direction. During this ordeal she saw only one street sign. It was at a small intersection, was half veiled by the drooping, speckled leaves of a gum tree, and bore an arrow and the legend ‘Baptist Church’.
In desperation Holly followed the arrow. She never found the Baptist Church, but as she and the Mazda idled, bemused, back at the intersection to which, somehow or other, she had returned without realising she was driving in a circle, a white ute with a brown cattle dog in the back rattled past.
Galvanised by the first sign of life she had seen for ten minutes, except for a few parked four-wheel drives (black), two goats (white) and a couple of magpies, Holly wrenched the wheel, put her foot down and set off in reckless pursuit. The ute clattered on for about fifteen seconds, braked noisily, turned abruptly left, then right, and pulled into the kerb just below a war memorial at the top of a broad, gently sloping street lined on both sides by quirky little two-–storeyed shops with old-fashioned awnings. A faded sign in the garden surrounding the war memorial read: ‘Welcome to Mealey Marshes’.
Holly wiped the sweat from her forehead and blinked. Here, it seemed, was Stillwaters Road, large as life. There was (of course) no street sign, but ‘Still Waters Cakes: Tasty Pies Since 1929’ was painted on the awning of the cake shop into which the ute driver was already disappearing.
Holly caught a flicker in her rear-vision mirror and became aware that Mealey Marshes’ apparent vehicle of choice, a black four-wheel drive, was idling at a polite distance behind her, obviously waiting for her to move on. She flapped her hand in flustered apology, drove shakily past the ute and backed the Mazda into a parking spot halfway down the street. Thrusting thoughts of Brigadoon from her mind, she got out of the car.
The street had a strangely melancholy air, but this might have been due to the greyness of the day and the plaintive accordion music being squeezed out by a pinched-looking busker standing outside the chemist’s shop with an upturned top hat at his feet. Ordinary-looking people meandered along the footpaths, strolled across the road and stood chatting at the doors of shops. Dogs tied to awning posts sat dreaming the dreams of dogs, looking animated only when another dog passed by.
There was no bank. There appeared to be no post office. There were no strollers, and no one was wearing a suit.
Holly saw, with a thrill of excitement, that the hair salon beside which she’d parked actually bore a number—5. All right, O’Brien, she thought. Here I come, ready or not. She crossed the road and set off on the track of 16A like a bloodhound who’d been given a scent.
O’Brien’s address wasn’t what she had expected. It turned out to be a narrow passage between a butcher’s shop and a place that sold secondhand books. The passage was painted with grinning white daisies, their fat green leaves spread incontinently against an iridescent mauve background on which pink clouds floated. The sign over the entrance read:
Abigail Honour, Clairvoyant & Psychic
Tarot Readings, Aromatherapy, Marriage Celebrant,
Justice of the Peace
Peering into the passage, Holly could just make out a door on the right-hand side. The door, which bore a rainbow with the sun shining over it, clearly marked the entrance to the clairvoyant’s rooms. The remainder of the passage was shrouded in darkness.
She hesitated, considering the possibilities. One, despite the sign on the cake shop awning, this wasn’t Stillwaters Road at all. Two, she had misread the number on O’Brien’s card. Three, O’Brien had given a false address, and made off with her hundred dollars. Four, O’Brien’s office was somewhere further down the passage.
All these theories had their merits, but the fourth appealed to her the most. She moved forward and immediately, it seemed, lost contact with the outside world. The sound of the accordion receded. Mauve engulfed her, and leering daisies closed in. There was a faint smell of fried onions and patchouli.
She reached the rainbow door and paused. Music, heavy on the panpipes, was playing in the room beyond. The door bore a notice that was a miniature duplicate of the one facing the street. Inside, then, the clairvoyant lurked.
Holly bared her teeth at the door, then screamed as it abruptly flew open. A plump woman with dangling earrings and a curly mass of violently red hair stood smiling in the doorway. She seemed to be clothed in an assortment of scarves.
‘Welcome, Christobel!’ she cooed, and beckoned invitingly.
Her heart pounding with shock, Holly backed away, babbling about looking for O’Brien. She could feel her face burning. The woman must have seen the bared teeth, yet she hadn’t seemed surprised. Perhaps people snarled at her all the time. Or perhaps she just assumed Holly had Tourette’s Syndrome.
‘Oh.’ The woman, presumably Abigail Honour herself, went on smiling, but the smile had lost its gloss. ‘I felt searching,’ she said. ‘I thought you were my ten o’clock.’
She pushed back the scarf that hung over her wrist and blinked shortsightedly at an enormous watch. ‘Twenty minutes late. Chickened out, I suppose. They’re always doing that. I wouldn’t mind, if only they’d ring and let me know.’
Holly resisted the ill-natured impulse to ask why that should be necessary. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, she could see that the corridor ended in a steep, narrow stairway. The stairs were decorated with painted green vines, and seemed to split near the top, leading away to left and right.
‘Mr O’Brien’s office is up the stairs, to the right,’ said Abigail Honour helpfully. ‘I’m sure he’s in. I sense his life force. Very powerful. Like the beating of great wings.’
Grinning and nodding idiotically, Holly turned, walked rapidly towards the stairway and began to climb. As she reached the place where the stairs split, she glanced up.
The four left-hand stairs led to a landing featuring a green door screened in white wrought-iron, a letterbox labelled ‘E.N. Moss (Mrs)’, a flowered doormat that read ‘Welcome to My Home’ and a large china donkey, its saddlebags sprouting plastic fuchsias in full pink and purple bloom.
The right-hand flight led to a broader landing, the uneven boards of which had been painted grass green dotted with red-and-white-spotted toadstools. Here the mauve of the wall had been relieved by a large red heart, in the centre of which was a door.
The back of Holly’s neck was burning. She looked behind her and saw that Abigail Honour was still standing in the corridor, watching her. The woman clasped her hands as if in prayer, and nodded encouragingly.
Holly scurried up the right-hand stairs. A line of yellow circles led through the toadstools to the heart like a row of stepping-stones. A prudent device by the artist, no doubt, to minimise the effects of wear and tear, but following the yellow circles made Holly feel even more like Dorothy in Munchkin Land than she had before.
She raised her hand to knock at the door, then froze as she heard a cracked, crooning voice coming from inside.
There was I, waiting at the church,
Waiting at the church, waiting at the church.
When I found he’d left me in the lurch,
Lor', how it did upset me.
Holly felt the blood rush to her cheeks. She rapped sharply on the door. The singing stopped abruptly, but no one came.
Holly waited a few moments then knocked again. ‘Mr O’Brien, it’s Holly Love!’ she called sharply. ‘I need to speak to you.’
Still no response.
Holly pressed her ear against the thick red paint, listening intently. And through the feeble fabric of the door, she heard a faint, sly cackle of laughter.
At that moment, something snapped in Holly Love. Perhaps, if she hadn’t heard the laughter, if silence had been preserved behind that flaring red door, she would eventually have turned and crept away, down the vine-twined stairs, along the grinning-daisy corridor, out into the melancholy street. Perhaps then, her mind numb, she would have got back into her car and driven away from Mealey Marshes, never to return. But she had heard the laughter. And after that, it was no more Miss Very-Nice-Girl.
‘I heard that! I know you’re in there, O’Brien!’ she screeched, beating at the door with the flat of her hand.
She heard a noise behind her and swung around. The green door on the other side of the stairwell had opened. A small, sweet-faced, white-haired old lady—E.N. Moss (Mrs), no doubt—was peering curiously through the curlicues of her security screen. She was wearing a fluffy pink jumper, a pink skirt and delicate high-heeled shoes. A large ginger cat sat beside her, looking protective and disapproving.
‘It’s all right,’ Holly gabbled. ‘I just want to see Mr O’Brien. He owes me money.’
The old lady’s eyes widened. Giving up on her, Holly flung herself back on the door, grabbed the bright red doorknob and twisted it viciously. The door jerked open, revealing a yawning, stuffy darkness beyond. There was an earsplitting shriek, echoed by the old lady on the opposite landing.
Shaking all over, Holly fumbled for the light switch, found it, flicked it on. Light flooded the long, narrow room. Sitting on the back of a tattered office chair drawn up to a red-painted desk was a large white cockatoo, its sulphur-yellow crest spiked as rigidly as the heavily gelled mohawk on an eighties punk, its round eyes wild, its beak wide as it shrieked again and again.
And lying on the threadbare carpet was O’Brien. Dead as mutton.