Nine Months Of Summer E-Book

Isobel Blackthorn

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Seeking asylum from the wreckage of her life, Yvette Grimm arrives in Australia and overstays her holiday visa.

Desperate to carve a life for herself as an illegal British migrant, she invests her hopes in a palm-reader’s prophecy: she is to meet the father of her children before she’s thirty. But Yvette is already twenty-nine, and the quest takes her on a picaresque journey of self-discovery and transformation.

Set in Perth against the backdrop of Australia’s migrant history present and past, Nine Months of Summer is a moving, relevant and at times comical story of personal growth, purpose and coming of age.

Leseprobe

NINE MONTHS OF SUMMER

ISOBEL BLACKTHORN

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

I. ONE

1.1

1.2

1.3

1.4

1.5

1.6

1.7

1.8

II. TWO

2.1

2.2

2.3

2.4

2.5

2.6

2.7

2.8

2.9

2.10

2.11

2.12

2.13

2.14

2.15

2.16

2.17

2.18

2.19

2.20

2.21

2.22

2.23

2.24

III. THREE

3.1

3.2

3.3

3.4

3.5

3.6

3.7

3.8

3.9

3.10

3.11

3.12

3.13

3.14

3.15

3.16

3.17

3.18

3.19

3.20

3.21

3.22

3.23

3.24

3.25

3.26

3.27

3.28

IV. FOUR

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6

4.7

4.8

4.9

4.10

4.11

4.12

Part V

5.1

5.2

5.3

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About the Author

Copyright (C) 2020 Isobel Blackthorn

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

PRAISE FOR ISOBEL BLACKTHORN

“Nine Months of Summer has all my favourite elements: politics, social justice and strong women characters. I applaud that Nine Months of Summer demands that its readers question the politics of asylum. Impeccably written in clear, succinct, yet sophisticated prose, Nine Months of Summer is a thoroughly enjoyable read.”

JASMINA BRANKOVICH

‘’Nine Months of Summer gives us an English perspective on a subject matter that is so often associated with non-English speaking peoples.”

JASMIN ATLEY

“I couldn’t put it down! I judge by whether a book grips me or I can take it or leave it. Nine Months of Summer gripped tight!”

MARGO SHAW

“A was a pleasure to read. Within pages of starting the book I was drawn into the story of Yvette and her relationships with the permanent women and transient men in her life. Capturing the inconsistencies in policy and disgust many feel about current politics around who is welcomed to Australia, the story travels across Australia. I have never been to Perth or Fremantle but I felt myself transported.”

KATHERINE WEBBER

“A highly readable novel, written in clear and direct prose. The story will win Isobel Blackthorn many friends, more so amongst women readers; the entire novel is fashioned from a distinctly female sensibility.”

ROBERT HILLMAN

For my mother, Margaret Rodgers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With special thanks to my daughter Liz Blackthorn for her astute and invaluable comments, and boundless enthusiasm for the work. My gratitude to visual artists Jude Walker and Rhonda Ayliffe for sharing with me their thoughts and experiences of art. My warmest thanks to Georgia Matthey for describing how she composed her artwork, Not Saying No. And many thanks to Vanessa Mercieca for her assistance with the Italian dialogue.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

CARL GUSTAV JUNG

PART1

ONE

1.1

Dents in the loop-pile carpet marked the legs of once-present furniture. The walls, bare, rendered an insipid peach. There was a faint smell of acrylic paint. Shutting herself in, she closed the bedroom door behind her, the slap-back echoes jeering, a clamour of recriminating voices.

She would never be enamoured with shoulds.

It had been a shrine in here. A room for storing the past. A box of a room, smaller then with all the clutter. When Yvette was last here, a teak-veneer wardrobe and a white melamine chest of drawers took up one wall. A single bed occupied the full length of the other. Hanging above the bed was a whimsical print of a young girl in a shabby brown dress, standing in a cobbled street beneath an industrial-grey sky, walled in to either side by flat-faced Victorian terraced houses receding to a point behind her. That print hung in all of her childhood bedrooms. The chest of drawers was crowded with artefacts. The gaudy vase she bought for her mother’s birthday one year. The pink jewellery box with the plastic ballerina that still twirled shakily to Fur Elise when she opened the lid. A content Snoopy lying atop his money-box kennel. The generous-faced alarm clock her mother gave her when she was ten which she had wound so tightly it never ticked again and had stayed stuck between eight and nine ever since. Yvette had been too ashamed to tell her.

A blade of sunlight sliced through the window’s beige fabric bars and stung her eyes. She hefted herself out of bed and swished the blind aside.

The window faced northeast, protected from the intense sun of summer by the foliage of a silver birch. She was in no doubt her mother had lined up the angles to make sure. The crisp light of early morning shone through the branches, now wintry bare, making a filigree pattern on the frost-burnt grass. Two parrots, bright and keen, preened on one of the lower limbs. The birch was set in a neat garden of clipped lawn and rose beds. Dotted here and there were grevilleas and bottle brushes, all neat and trim. Her mother had a fondness for reds, stately reds, traditional and rich. There ought to be topiary. Box hedges and cascades of wisteria. And white picket fences. Instead the garden was hemmed by barbed wire strung between red-gum posts, electrified to keep out the cattle. Beyond, there was a backdrop of undulating paddocks peppered with majestic red gums. The entire valley embraced by an armchair of forested mountains. Bucolic paradise, worthy of the brushstrokes of Alfred Sisley.

The air was calm. Dew glistened on a spider web hanging under the veranda. A kookaburra’s cackling crescendo burst into the silence.

Forcing herself into the day, she pulled a baggy red jumper over her head and slipped on the size-eight jeans she used to wear as a teenager. She could scarcely believe her mother had kept her old clothes. But she was grateful. She owned nothing but the handful of sarongs and summer dresses she’d squashed into her cobalt-blue travelling bag when she left Malta, rugged and dry, for the moist and fecund Bali. The same cobalt-blue travelling bag she used to move her things into Carlos’s house. Her beloved Carlos. She couldn’t bear to look at the bag. She’d shoved it behind some shoe boxes in the bottom of the wardrobe the moment she arrived.

Where was he now? Still in Bali? Heading back to Malta? No doubt coveting the backside of every stewardess on the flight.

She sat down on the edge of the bed without feeling the grip of her jeans against her belly. Weren’t these the pair she used to zip up with the hook of a coat hanger? She was thin, a waif, sure to wander hither and yon, pulling her heart behind her like a clobbered plastic duck on squeaky wooden wheels.

Hearing a clatter of plates, she closed the door on her discontents and headed to the kitchen.

Her mother’s presence permeated the whole of this open-plan Hardiplank kit-home. She was in the three-piece suite, the hearthrug and the pine dining table, so highly polished the reflection of the morning sun dazzled as Yvette walked by. She was in every framed print hanging on the walls, in every ornament and knick-knack, from the Spode plates, Wedgewood saucers and porcelain figurines right down to the glass rolling pin she kept in a kitchen drawer. Even the doormat had her footprint on it. In this house Yvette could only be her daughter, the prodigal returned after a ten-year absence.

Her mother, Leah, was bending down to reach into the cupboard under the sink. Her buttocks bulged like buns in the seat of the dull-blue track pants she wore around the house. Hearing Yvette enter the kitchen, she turned and raised herself up to her full height, much shorter than Yvette recalled, and smiled before her gaze slid away. Leah had aged. Short curly hair, ten years earlier a mop of nutty brown, now thin and white. The freckles on her face had joined together, giving her fair skin a sandy patina. Her hazel eyes were still vigilant, yet softer, more resigned. There was a slight downturn to the mouth. Her face had lines, wrinkles and creases where once there were none. Yvette found it hard to accustom herself to the changes. And there was a sluggishness in the way her mother moved. Yvette remembered her energy, always darting about, not exactly agile, but deft. She felt remote. And was saddened by it. Too many years living intensely while her mother grew vegetables. Yvette was a stranger to her but she didn’t seem to know it.

She grabbed a cereal bowl from the cupboard beside the cooker and opened the pantry door.

‘Tea?’

Yvette turned to see her mother pouring boiling water into a second cup.

‘We’ll fill out the immigration forms after breakfast,’ Leah said, heading out through the back door with an ice-cream container of vegetable scraps. Her mother was the most practical woman Yvette had ever known. She’d sent off for the permanent residency forms the moment Yvette told her she was coming.

She had to get out of Bali. She was too distressed to stay. So distressed that the travel agent in Kuta, a small and wizened man with a permanent and insanely broad grin, had driven her all over Denpasar on his scooter to help secure the holiday visa and the one-way ticket to Sydney.

Yvette went to the dining table with her breakfast, sitting with her back to the sun. She flicked through the form. She wanted to gain residency through the deadlocked back door. She thought she might be eligible under the family reunion category. She read through the instructions and found she wasn’t. Her father was still in England. She hadn’t seen him for years and had no intention of ever doing so, but he was a blood parent.

Her mother came back inside and joined her. Yvette passed her the form and watched her leaf through the pages, scrutinising the instructions, lips tightening.

‘Perhaps there’s a loophole,’ she murmured.

A loophole that benefits a refugee? In the Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s draconian rule system? Impossible. Besides, she could hardly claim that were she to return to Malta her life would be in danger. That when Carlos had reached across that restaurant table in Bali and pulled her hair, his fit of frustration constituted an act of persecution or torture. Yvette was seeking refuge from the wreckage of her life.

Leah leafed again through the pages. ‘There might be compassionate grounds.’

‘Mum, I don’t…’ She stopped speaking. They both knew there wasn’t a skerrick of compassion in the Department of Immigration’s institutional bones.

She drained her cup and took her breakfast things back to the kitchen then wandered across the living room and gazed out the window. A long lock of mist drifted in the valley, slipping through a stand of red gums.

Leah was watching her closely. ‘You’ll have to get married,’ she said matter-of-factly, as if in the time it had taken Yvette to walk to the kitchen and back she’d conceived the solution.

‘Married?’

‘It’s the only way.’

‘I couldn’t,’ she said emphatically, shocked that her mother would even consider the thought. It wasn’t the deception that bothered her. There was a part of her, the romantic and the fool, adamant that marriage had to be a contract founded on love, not convenience.

Without another word Yvette filled out the form and slid it into an envelope along with a vague hope of a miracle and the relevant photocopied pages of her British passport—the holiday visa, the page with the photo of her face with its wooden grin and harried brown eyes. She knew she was far prettier than that.

It would be months before she heard the outcome. Meanwhile she needed a job. For that, Leah told her she needed a tax file number. Even for the most menial of casual work.

‘The post office will have the form,’ she said. ‘Shall I run you into town?’

‘I’ll walk.’

She stuffed the envelope in her pocket and went outside. The air was fresh, the morning bright. Taking up one of the plastic chairs beside the woodpile, she shuffled her feet into a pair of Leah’s old volleys and tightly tied the laces to compensate for her size feet. Leah was a nine, Yvette an eight.

Her mother’s cat, a plump tortoiseshell, rubbed against her calf. She ruffled her hand through its fur. The cat followed her to the fence then lost interest and trotted back to the house.

She closed the gate behind the garden and picked her way through the paddock, avoiding the spats of cow manure, and across the cattle grid. The farm straddled the lower reaches of gullied hills some two kilometres north of Cobargo. Heading for the highway, she walked up the dirt track that snaked through a neighbour’s property. His paddocks were denuded. Dead trees, ghostly white, their contorted limbs stretching heavenward, stood like monuments to the forest pre-dating the squatters. The only surviving trees were the apple gums growing on batholithic hillcrests. Their roots smothered in middens of cow dung heaped by generations of paddock-clearing farmers.

Leaving the paddocks behind, she followed a dirt road that flanked a hillside of bush, and reached a T-junction. Directly across the highway, in a swathe of mown grass, the cemetery displayed the gravestones of the departed to every vehicle travelling up and down this remote stretch of road. Somewhere among the gathering of Catholic graves lay her stepfather.

She turned right and headed down to the village huddled at the bottom of the valley, a quaint gathering of gift shops and cafes housed in historic weatherboard and brick buildings. She crossed the road at the newsagency and passed the art gallery, formerly a petrol station. On the forecourt, in the shade of a deep awning, an elaborate sculpture spilling from an old iron wheel rim sat beside two defunct petrol bowsers. Ahead, on the other side of the creek, was the hotel, a brick and tile boozer no doubt frequented by she’ll-be-right-mate beery blokes and their whisky-and-coke drinking sheilas. On a rise a short way up the road that wound west to the hinterland of dairy farms and wilderness were the primary school and the Catholic church. The Anglican church stared piously from its equally lofty location to the east. The village, with a history entrenched in milking cows, remained as self-sufficient as ever it was, supplying the needs of man and beast. There was a doctor’s surgery, a vet clinic, a police station and even a swimming pool. The few back streets contained a smattering of vintage weatherboard cottages and contemporary brick and Hardiplank houses interspersed with vacant blocks. The village hadn’t changed an iota since she was last here. The butcher, baker, supermarket and post office were exactly as she remembered them. The sweeping views that surrounded the village failed to inspire her. They might as well have been murals plastered to her mother’s living-room walls.

The year Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity, her mother for the second time upped to a better life in this land of plenty, settling here in Cobargo with Yvette’s stepfather and sister, Debbie, the moment they arrived in Australia, foregoing all the opportunities that Sydney might afford for a pastoral dream. Not a tree-change, they were too conventional for alternatives. They felled the remaining red gums on their hundred-acre block before Yvette followed, and six weeks later, left, before her stepfather, Joe, a robust gung-ho sort of man with a penchant for guzzling lager, lost his life to a chain saw. Leah and Joe hadn’t been together long. A sudden and gruesome accident, the sort of tragedy that rips into all that is soft and vulnerable. But her mother was a tight-lipped woman; her letters never mentioned her grief. With Yvette back in England she turned to the only family she had here, Debbie.

When Yvette last saw Debbie she was a smug sixteen-year-old, proud to be engaged to a local boy. She had her own story; distinct from Yvette’s as cotton wool and splinters, a cushiony narrative of stability and marital harmony. Now Yvette couldn’t walk down the main street of the village without being identified as Debbie’s sister. The moment she entered the post office a buxom woman, squeezing past on her way outside, looked her up and down and said, ‘Are you Debbie’s sister?’

‘That’s me,’ she said with a forced smile, thinking, no actually, she’s my sister since I was born first. Even as the words ran through her mind she felt contrite. Resentment wasn’t becoming. Yet the people around here hadn’t a clue who she was. And she wasn’t about to tell them. Only she didn’t want to be defined as her mother’s daughter or her sister’s sister, aligned with the secretary of the agricultural show society and the dairy farmer’s wife.

Her mother was working on next year’s show when she returned. Notepads, forms, old programs, raffle tickets and a cash box were spread across the dining table. Yvette sat in the chair furthest from Leah and read through the identification requirements on the tax-file-number form. Bank account, driver’s licence and Medicare card, none could be acquired without showing her immigration status.

‘It’s no good, Mum,’ she said, dropping the form on the table and leaning back in her seat. ‘I can’t get one.’

Her mother peered over the rim of her glasses. ‘I thought not.’ She put down her pen and folded her arms under her bosom. ‘We should have become citizens before we went back to England.’

‘You weren’t to know.’

‘At the time I never thought I’d come back. I’d had enough. I spent those last years here cleaning the corridors and classrooms of your old primary school.’

‘And I caught the school bus.’

She’d started school the year Alanis Morissette vied with Celine Dion for first place in the charts. On that bus Yvette must have listened to Ironic and Because You Loved Me twice a day for months. Even then she preferred satire to sentimentality.

Those first years of school were fabulous. There were sleepovers at her best friend Heather McAllister’s place. Fun in the park across the street. The orange tree beside the house, laden with the juiciest, sweetest fruit. She had the best year. Her mother had her worst.

It was her mother’s decision to emigrate, both times. The first was in 1993. Leah wanted to leave the London of working-class council housing estates. Common-as-muck, she’d say. Leah had left school at sixteen to spend a few months skivvying as an office junior before moving on to work in a cinema kiosk and a shoe shop, then becoming a traffic warden—a career that appealed to her because she worked outdoors and alone, unmolested by bitchy co-workers, creepy patrons and dithering customers with smelly feet. Yvette’s father, Jimmy, was a skilled factory worker. He was born a Cockney, his family relocated to South London during the post-war slum clearances. Leah wanted to better Jimmy. She thought Australia held the promise of a better life for her. That’s what the brochures told her. So she filled out the forms and flew them to Australia.

Leah’s best friend at primary school, Gloria, along with her family, had migrated to Perth twenty years before. They were ten-pound Poms. Gloria had written to Leah regularly ever since. One of a small store of Grimm-family vignettes was how fortunate they’d been to avoid the Nissen huts of Graylands. Poor Gloria—that was what her mother called her friend—had gone from a three-bedroom terraced house in London to bunk beds in a migrant hostel. Leah thought the conditions scandalous. The hut had unlined corrugated-iron walls and bare wooden floorboards. And Gloria’s family had to share communal dining and communal ablutions with all the other migrants from Europe and the Middle East. Pentonville, Leah called it. Pentonville. For years Yvette thought her mother meant one of the pale-blue set in Monopoly. Leah was referring to the jail. You could stay there for months, a voluntary sentence, but a week had been enough for Gloria’s mum.

It was Gloria who’d arranged the three-bedroom rental in Kwinana and suggested Jimmy apply for a position at the aluminium refinery. Leah went on to buy a brick and tile home in Perth’s English-migrant capital, Rockingham.

Five years later, Leah was ready to move back to London. Australia didn’t fulfil her expectations. She couldn’t find satisfying work. She wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy with Yvette’s father.

Back in London, Leah returned to her preferred career of traffic warden, much to Yvette’s teenage consternation. While Yvette chewed the ends of her Biros in class, her mother’s life was unfolding apace. Leah Grimm became Leah Betts. With a new husband in tow, she emigrated a second time.

Yvette stayed behind, and stayed Grimm.

She couldn’t fathom why, when she was just eighteen, her mother chose to emigrate for a country where she found so little happiness the first time around.

1.2

A red-gum log burned gently in the wood heater. Leah was watching Days of Our Lives, her weekdays cleaved by frothy melodrama. Yvette gazed out the window. She had no tolerance for her mother’s habit. To her, the soaps were shallow, over-acted, lip-quivering drivel. She couldn’t bring herself to admit she had enough going on inside her to fill an entire series.

Outside, a fierce southerly buffeted the grevilleas and bottlebrushes. Leah said she lost a shrub every year. Snaps off right at the base and rolls about like spinifex. Yvette watched the shrubs cower. She felt adrift, her own roots shallow, their grasp in the soil of a stable life tenuous. Her mother’s soap addiction reinforcing feelings of tremendous isolation. Leah was an impossible anchor. She had an astonishing capacity to get on with the practical day-to-day that alienated Yvette at every turn. She’d rather her mother thrashed and flailed like a shrub decapitated by that uncompromising wind. At least now and then. If only she would let down her reserve.

In an effort to relieve her listless mood, Yvette flicked through the local paper that her mother had brought back from her bi-weekly run into the village. When she came to the last pages she scanned the small ads. The Cobargo hotel needed a cleaner. She felt a swirl of contempt; her life had come to this. Yet it was the only listing. In deference to her mother, she waited for the adverts then dialled the number, hoping the job would be cash-in-hand.

A woman answered.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Yvette Grimm. I’m calling about the cleaning job.’

‘Are you new in town?’

Straight away she knew she was too well-spoken to be a local, and too well-spoken to be a cleaner, but she kept those thoughts to herself. ‘I’m Debbie Smith’s sister,’ she said, knowing as she spoke that the claim was an appeal for acceptance.

‘Ah.’

The woman warmed to her.

Maybe there was some advantage in being known as Debbie’s sister.

She started work the following Thursday.

It was a cool and sunny day. Heading for the hotel, Yvette walked down to the village, glancing up the road at the Catholic church as she crossed the bridge over the creek. Debbie’s farm was a short walk further on. Since her return, Debbie had been away visiting her sister-in-law. She’d returned yesterday. And she’d be at home now. Her boys at school. Alan in the paddocks with the cows. The sisterly thing would be to call in after the shift.

She pulled open the heavy wooden door of the hotel and went through to the bar, long and dark with too much tacky chrome. A sickly odour of yesterday’s beer perfumed the air. She nodded at the old man seated on a stool over by the cigarette machine, who gave her a languid smile. Otherwise, the bar was empty.

Before long, a middle-aged woman appeared. She was in her thirties, dressed as if ready for the beach in T-shirt, shorts and thongs, her blonde hair pinned back in a ponytail. ‘G’day,’ she said. ‘You must be Yvette. I’m Brenda.’ She grinned as she gave Yvette a single appraising sweep of her eye. ‘Come with me.’

She followed Brenda across the car park to the cleaner’s storeroom, located in the centre of a row of motel rooms. Brenda talked her through the cleaning procedures, detailed and exacting, and handed her a bunch of keys. ‘Cash all right?’

‘That’s fine.’ Thank God, but already she was sinking at the prospect of the work ahead. The view of the rolling hills and the mountains did nothing to loosen the tightening knot of resistance in her guts.

She wheeled the cleaning trolley from one stuffy, pastel-coloured room to another. She stripped and re-made beds, emptied bins, polished, mopped and vacuumed. She did it all with no enthusiasm whatsoever. She earned ten dollars per room, slave wages, and only by cleaning three rooms per hour did she feel the work remotely close to worthwhile. She hated it. Her back hated it. Her self-esteem sloshed with the grime at the bottom of the mop bucket.

She walked back to her mother’s house without glancing at the road to her sister’s farm.

1.3

Yvette spent the solstice weeks in a numb haze. She helped in the garden, mowing lawns, pruning, weeding and harvesting, all performed under Leah’s watchful eye, as if she were poised to kill or maim a darling member of the floral kingdom any moment. She soon decided her mother’s passion for gardening was fanatical and unbearably tedious—who cared if this year’s blooms won first prize in the show?

One afternoon, she could endure the watcher no more and downed tools, feigning exhaustion to sit in the warm sun with a sketchbook and pencil. She idly traced the lines of a dead tree in the neighbour’s paddock, pathetic efforts, knowing what she was capable of. She missed the luxury of her studio space and ready access to materials at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, luxuries she had taken for granted at the time.

Later, while her mother enjoyed her soaps, she lay on her single bed, isolated and apart. She felt tattered. A teddy bear come apart at the seams. All her stuffing gone. About now she’d have been plump about the belly, all flushed and expectant and busy knitting booties. She met the gaze of the forlorn girl in the print above her bed. Poor little girl. What tragedy wrecked her?

She knew she was wallowing in her gloom. Yet she had latched on to her loss with an unrelenting clasp. She had to let go, she would let go, she was poised to do just that, but not yet. Although even now her dogged sadness had begun to feel ridiculous.

When the living room went silent and she heard the fly screen bang shut, she traipsed to the living room and slumped on the sofa. Moments later the fly screen banged again. Yvette didn’t move. Then she sensed her mother standing over her. ‘Cheer up.’

‘I’m all right,’ she said. Leah had no inkling of Yvette’s abortion and Yvette wasn’t about to confide.

‘You haven’t seen Debbie since you arrived.’

‘She knows where I am,’ Yvette said sourly.

‘She’s waiting for an invitation.’

‘It’s hard. We don’t get on.’

In her mind she was understating the emotional distance that had grown between them. They were estranged, Yvette had decided, having grown attached to the fact that only twice in their ten years apart had she received news directly from her sister and not via their mother, a card announcing the birth of each of her boys. She emitted a heavy sigh but her mother was steadfast, waving a finger in the direction of the telephone. Forcing down her own resistance, Yvette swung her legs to the floor. Satisfied, her mother went outside.

With no expectation of anything beneficial arising from this coerced reunion, Yvette lifted the receiver and stabbed the numbers on the keypad. A female voice answered.

‘Hi. It’s Yvette,’ she said flatly.

‘Yvette! How are you?’

‘Good. And you?’

‘Great to hear your voice. Welcome back!’

‘Thanks.’

They chatted about the old times Yvette didn’t care to remember, of their childhood days in Perth, teenage years in London. After what seemed an eon of small talk, she succumbed to an impulse to be convivial and invited Debbie over for coffee.

The following afternoon she watched an old Holden ute buck and bounce down the long dirt track, pulling up beside the machinery shed. A figure of average build, dressed in baggy pants and a sky-blue T-shirt, walked in strides towards the house with the easy-going gait of the Australian country woman. Yvette knew the woman was Debbie but strained to recognise in her the Debbie she’d grown up with—a cute, freckle-faced, impish girl with a self-conscious smile. She looked to Yvette now like every other twenty-something woman in the area, totally lacking in style. Her hair was long and brown and shapelessly cut. The T-shirt hung limply from her bust; the pants, on closer inspection, were pilling; and the fawn Crocs she sported to complete her outfit looked like foot boats. Yet her smile was warm, her brown eyes seemed genuine and Yvette softened in her company.

They sat in the garden on the north side of the house, sheltering from the cold southerly wind. Leah waved from the veranda and offered to make tea. She returned five minutes later with two mugs and a plate of Monte Carlos.

‘Why don’t you join us?’ Yvette said, suddenly craving relief from the intimacy of just the two of them.

Leah mumbled something about needing to clean the house. Yvette knew it was an excuse. The house was immaculate.

Debbie took a few sips of her tea before blathering on about her two boys with that familiar need to prove her worth chiming with every comment. She glowed over their achievements at school—a merit award for this, a merit award for that, how good Peter was in the junior soccer team, the terrific progress Simon was making with the violin and how marvellous it was that they were both in the school choir performing at next year’s folk festival held at the showground. Choir? At a folk festival? Forgetting she once loved to sing, Yvette couldn’t imagine any pursuit more cringe-worthy. She couldn’t countenance being part of anything amateur and looked down from an absurdly high height at anyone, young or old, who did.

She stared absently at the distant hills, doing her best to be polite while fending off jealousy over the doting interest Debbie took in her boys. Her sister hadn’t the conversational grace to ask about the last decade of her life. But then again, it was probably better Debbie didn’t know how far her sister had drifted from their mother’s upright morality, campus adventures as she limped from one boyfriend to the next, and in Malta, where she’d taken unconventionality to a precipice with her flirtations in the iniquitous underworld of drugs and crime. It had been easy to do. Too easy. Easy to keep the truth from them too. Her letters contained the veneer of her studies at art school, then her sight-seeing escapades with her best friend Josie and their glorious life in the sun. And as for her mother and sister, neither visited her once in that whole ten years. Not once.

A pair of parrots, splendidly red and green, perched on the bird table, chortling to each other. Yvette raised a hand to slide her hair behind her ears and they flew away. She was wondering how to divert her sister’s attention from her offspring when Debbie set her mug at her feet and said, ‘I dreamt about you last night.’ Her tone had an intimate ring. ‘You were standing on my veranda in a long red dress, with a gorgeous young man beside you.’

‘What happened?’

Debbie blushed. She seemed awkward. ‘Nothing,’ she said, averting her gaze. ‘But I had a strong sense you were meant to be together.’

The wind gusted from the south, blowing a shaft of Yvette’s hair in her face. She smoothed a hand across her cheek, feeling in her belly an echo of the childhood thrill of teasing her sister. She sat on the edge of her seat and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘That’s weird.’ She widened her eyes. ‘Maybe it’s a premonition.’

‘Don’t.’

‘It’s a coincidence at least.’ Yvette relished in the game. Debbie had always been easily spooked. ‘A psychic read my palm before I left Malta. I was in a nightclub and an old woman with leathery skin and a mystical look in her eyes took hold of my hand. She said I would meet the father of my children before I was thirty.’ And as she spoke, the words took on a potency they had lacked before that moment. As if in the telling she was imbuing the prophecy with all the significance of the cosmos.

‘She was probably drunk,’ Debbie said.

‘She wasn’t. She was emphatic. She grabbed my arm and told me he was definitely not the man I was with.’

‘Carlos?’

‘Carlos.’

‘She got that part right.’

‘What would you know?’ Yvette said sharply.

‘Sorry.’

Their mother’s cat flopped down at their feet and arched her back.

‘Maybe I was meant to come to Australia to find him.’ Her voice had gone all misty.

‘Who?’

‘The father of my children.’

She knew it was ludicrous but the prediction had suddenly given her hope. Although she couldn’t imagine encountering an Australian man she’d find desirable. None of the Aussie men she’d met had charisma, mystique or originality. They looked generic, they sounded generic and they were all into sport.

1.4

Yvette was sitting in the living room, teasing her cuticles to better show the half-moons. Leah was glued to The Young and the Restless. The phone rang. ‘You answer it,’ she said without moving her eyes from the screen.

She picked up the receiver expecting to hear her sister’s voice. Debbie was the only person who dared call during the daily soap-opera marathon. Instead, Yvette heard a heavily accented male voice asking to speak to her. It was Carlos. Passion bolted through her. She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn to her chest. She wasn’t even sure she could speak. ‘Ciao,’ she managed.

‘Ciao, il mio amore.’

She was silent. He called her ‘his love’, but she knew there was no substance to the words. He didn’t love her. He didn’t know how to love her. He didn’t have it in him to love anyone but himself. But she couldn’t stop her guts somersaulting.

‘Sono qui,’ he said, adding in slow accented English, ‘The Gold Coast.’

He was here?

‘Yvette. Viene con me.’

Go with him? ‘No. Non posso.’ She had to resist.

‘Ho bisogno di te.’

He needed her?

‘Mi dispiace,’ she said. It was a vacuous reply. She wasn’t sorry at all. She was torn.

There was a pause. Then he said, ‘Per favore.’

Why was he persisting?

‘Ti prego l’autobus,’ he said.

‘No. Non ho soldi, Carlos.’ That was true. She was broke.

‘Yvette. Ti amo.’

‘Non ho soldi.’ She tried to sound insistent. She felt limp. She wanted to run to him, badly, wanted to spend her whole life by his side, live in his house, birth a gaggle of his babies, be immersed forevermore in the culture she loved. Instead, she hung up the phone wishing she’d never given him her mother’s number, and slouched on the sofa with a hard lump in her throat, knowing it was going to be hard to exorcise that man from her heart.

1.5

Debbie called as the credits rolled on the last soap of the day and invited Yvette to a friend’s house for dinner. ‘You’ll like Tracy,’ she said. ‘She’s an artist. She’s your type.’

Yvette doubted it. She couldn’t imagine any of Debbie’s friends being her type. ‘Thanks for thinking of me. But …’

‘I’ll pick you up at five.’

‘What about Alan and the boys?’

‘Alan’s taking them on a scout camp.’

She didn’t feel like going, preferring the familiarity of her misery. Yet she couldn’t think of a way to decline so she agreed and hung up the phone.

‘Who was that?’ Leah said, switching off the television.

‘Debbie.’ She went on to explain the invitation.

‘It’ll do you good,’ Leah said.

She wasn’t convinced.

She didn’t bother to change out of the old jeans she wore as a teenager and the baggy red jumper that had become as symbolic to her as Linus’ blanket. When she heard Debbie’s ute, she left her mother half knitting, half watching a documentary, catching a glimpse of the wreckage of a boat washed up on a beach by a wild sea, the voice-over announcing at least twenty-two asylum seekers dead in the capsize. She paused then went outside, barely absorbing what she’d seen. In Malta, boat arrivals from Somalia were a frequent occurrence and never to a warm reception; the Maltese government claiming, with good foundation they thought, that the island was in the front line and if they didn’t impose a deterrent the floodgates would open. Yvette had been as indifferent then as she was now, too busy with the travails of her own life to care that much about the lives of others.

Instead, as she opened the passenger door she wondered how her mother coped with her small and dreary life. How she would never, ever, end up living like that.

‘Hi sis. So pleased to have you back,’ Debbie said fondly. ‘Truly I am.’

‘Thanks.’ She forced a smile.

‘How are you finding it here? Bit of a change from your old life, eh?’

‘It’s strange.’ She couldn’t help sounding distant.

Debbie threw the gearstick into reverse and hit the accelerator, the ute lunging backwards towards their mother’s rose bed. She braked, changed gear and hit the accelerator again, the ute charging through the paddock, juddering over the cattle grid and bumping over every rut and pothole in the track.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ Debbie said. Was she referring to her driving or Australia? Right now it was hard to decide which was the more precarious.

Debbie slowed as they neared the highway, making a right turn and cruising down the smooth tarmac to the village. ‘Maybe you’ll settle down.’

Yvette didn’t speak. They crawled through the village, Debbie accelerating hard up the hill on the other side. ‘Do you think you’ll stay here?’

‘I doubt it.’

This time Debbie made no comment.

Yvette stared out the window at the scenery: the majesty of the mountain to the north that presided over the landscape like a benevolent mother, now silhouetted against a darkening sky; the red gums and apple gums casting long shadows over undulating farmland; the granite outcrops and the cute weatherboard farm houses; and the mountains to the west slumbering beneath a wide band of soft apricot.

About five kilometres on, after a sharp bend to the left, Debbie told her to look out for a flitch-clad shack perched on a hill.

‘Nearly there,’ she said brightly.

‘So how do you know Tracy?’

‘She’s a voluntary scripture teacher at the primary school. She taught Buddhism to Peter and Simon.’

Debbie swung by the carcass of an old fridge and a rusty milk urn propped on its side on a trifurcated log, and hurtled up a long and liberally cratered driveway.