by Brandy Scott
At least Lou didn’t. Aimee reached above her head, trimmed back a vine that was getting carried away with itself. Nick sometimes questioned why Lou was still part of their tight little threesome. ‘She’s still the same as she was in high school,’ he’d say after a few drinks. ‘While you two have clearly moved on.’ But that’s what Aimee appreciated about Lou. She wasn’t obsessed with growth and goals. Aimee secretly admired Lou for not giving in to Melinda’s efforts to change her — and for not trying to change Aimee either. There were no gentle suggestions that Aimee might like to look at a career now the children were older, no questions about what she was going to do next. And Lou would never suggest that Aimee had banged on too long about something. Aimee decimated a cobweb with one heavy swipe of her secateurs. Lou let her talk for as long as she needed. Lou was steady. Reliable. You knew where you were with Lou, and for that Aimee loved her.
She would not hit her daughter. She would not hit her daughter. Lou unclenched her fist mid-swing and grabbed hold of her mother’s silk curtains instead. She tugged and yanked until the entire right side of the scalloped pavlova came crashing to the ground.
Tansy stared at her, wide-eyed. ‘What are you doing?
Lou didn’t answer. Instead, she grabbed the remaining curtain with her good hand and pulled, hooks popping out of casings like tiny firecrackers, until that too lay puddled at her feet. Another few rips and the prissy nets followed. Light flooded unfettered into the bedroom for the first time in decades. Lou let out a whoop. She should have done that months ago. She swept her arm across the glass top of her mother’s dresser, and a flock of china sheep jumped from their doily fields to certain death.
‘Mum?’
‘Fucking yes!’ Lou picked up a china shepherdess and lobbed her at the wall. The shepherdess fell to the floor with a crack, her separated head staring at Lou pityingly. ‘Fuck, I hate Lladro!’
‘Mum, what’s going on?’
Lou swung around, a crystal clock in her hand. ‘I am breaking a cycle,’ she declared, pitching the clock at a bevelled mirror with a fierce underarm. Glittering shards rained down on the carpet; not bad, for her left. ‘I am shattering illusions.’ She collapsed against the dresser, laughing at her own joke.
‘I’m going to call Aimee,’ said Tansy, inching backwards towards the door.
‘Don’t step in that,’ Lou said automatically. ‘You’ll cut yourself.’ She turned around slowly, looking for something else to destroy. God, that bloody rug. Lou tried to pick the sheepskin up with one hand, but it was too unwieldy. ‘Oh come on, Tansy, don’t be so boring. Help me throw this thing out the window.’
Tansy shook her head. ‘You’ve gone mad.’
‘No I haven’t,’ said Lou, wrestling with the window catch, rug tucked awkwardly under one arm. ‘I am having a paradigm shift.’ A Melinda phrase; she laughed again, slightly hysterically. ‘All this time, I’ve been trying to be different from my parents, while living their same bloody life.’ She rested against the cool glass. ‘You and I, Tansy, are in a self-perpetuating cycle, and I am going to damn well break us out of it.’ The window catch seemed to have been painted shut; Lou pulled back, then rammed her hip against it. ‘Help me get this open, will you?’
‘If you throw that out on the grass it’ll rot,’ said Tansy.
‘So?’
‘But it will be ruined.’
‘Good!’ Lou stared at her daughter. ‘Come on, Tans. You hate this place as much as I do. Let’s trash it.’
Tansy took the sheepskin off her mother. ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea.’
‘It’s a bloody great idea. Get rid of all this old shit.’ Lou kicked at a flimsy bedside table; it toppled instantly. ‘All of it, gone. Just imagine!’
‘I think you should stop.’
‘I don’t.’ Lou kicked the table again, harder this time. Its front leg splintered. ‘I won’t. It’s all going. All of it.’
‘But what will we do for furniture?’
‘Buy some. Steal some. Sleep on the bloody floor, I don’t know. I just want things to be different.’
‘But you can’t chuck everything out the window. It’ll look even worse.’
She had a point. ‘We’ll rent a skip then.’
‘You’re serious.’
‘Deadly.’
Tansy frowned. ‘Don’t you have to order them in advance?’
‘That would probably be the only perk of eight years working for the Hensley Council.’ Lou strode into the kitchen and grabbed her mobile. Tansy followed nervously, still hugging the dead-dog rug. ‘Tom? It’s Lou. I need a skip. No, at my house. It’s an emergency. Burst pipe. Yeah, exactly. Water everywhere. Oh, and I won’t be finishing the accounts any time soon. Place is in ruins. Can you let Rex know? Cheers, Tom.’ She flicked the phone onto silent. ‘Right then. Let’s get to it.’
Tansy didn’t move, just clutched the rug to her chest like the old Barbie beach towel she used to cart everywhere. Lou put an arm around her daughter.
‘C’mon, Tans,’ she said quietly. ‘Let’s go crazy. It’ll be fun. And God knows, you and I could use a fresh start.’
Tansy considered the proposal. ‘Can we get rid of Grandad’s birds?’
‘Hell yes.’
‘Okay.’ She nodded slowly. ‘Where do we start?’
Lou looked around the kitchen, a homage to formica. ‘In here,’ she decided, dragging a rubbish bin into the centre of the room. ‘Everything ugly, everything we hate, goes in the bin until the skip turns up.’ She grabbed a couple of black plastic bags and thrust them at Tansy. ‘Here you go, fill your boots.’
‘Are you ready to hear from the woman behind it all? The woman who made LoveLocked possible?’
Backstage, Melinda winced. The warm-up act was trying desperately to whip the audience into a frenzy, but they were Australian, not American. They didn’t do frenzies. ‘This is just embarrassing,’ she hissed at Clint.
‘Shhh,’ he said. ‘They’re loving it. Listen.’
There was a faint whooping amid the polite applause. Melinda peeked out from behind the curtain; most of the ballroom was seated, but the front row, her top sellers, were on their feet and cheering obediently.
‘Here.’ Clint poked her with something. ‘Take this with you.’
It was a coffee mug. ‘Is it vodka?’ She turned it round; BOSSBABE was printed on the other side, in gold letters. ‘Oh no, I don’t do that sort of shit. You know that.’
‘But your curators do. In fact, one of them sent you this.’ He consulted his iPad. ‘Christie, from Adelaide.’
Melinda shook her head, but kept hold of the mug.
‘Five seconds,’ the stage manager whispered, as the warm-up act begged the audience to make some noise. ‘Three. Two. Melinda, you’re on.’
The curtains rose, and Melinda strode out onto the stage in a puff of smoke and glitter. Really? Just for a moment, she missed the days when they used to hold their annual meeting in Starbucks, free refills for all. Then she was hit by the pure adrenaline of the lights, the thumping Beyoncé, the women who were now standing and cheering, jumping some of them — God bless millennials — and the intoxicating knowledge that she had built this. This was hers.
‘Hello, LoveLocked!’ she bellowed. ‘Welcome to Sydney!’
The room roared back, nine hundred and something women who loved her jewellery so much they had travelled from across the Pacific to hear what she had to say. Melinda kicked off her heels and walked to the edge of the stage, sat down on the side so she was as close to her people as possible. ‘I’m so stoked you could all make it,’ she told them, hugging a few of the more eager curators who bounced up from their seats. ‘All this way, from Perth, from Darwin, from Adelaide — Thank you, Christie!’ Melinda waved her mug — ‘from Auckland, from Wellington, from Fiji. And for those of you who live in Sydney, how lucky are you, right? Such a great city!’ Wild applause. ‘I’m going to try to make sure I speak to every single one of you over the n
ext two days so I can hear first-hand how LoveLocked is working in your life — good and bad. Especially the bad, because anything that’s not working, I want to fix.’
There was more applause. Clint had warned her not to start with a negative, but Melinda knew her curators, and she knew what they wanted to hear. ‘Please,’ she continued, ‘if we haven’t spoken before the conference ends, grab one of the organising team, grab me, follow me into the bathroom, whatever. Because nothing, and I mean nothing, is more important to me than your opinion.’
Someone rolled a bottle of water along the stage; Melinda grabbed it and topped up. ‘We’ve got loads to get through over the next forty-eight hours. There’s going to be a lot of learning, and a lot of fun as well. Most importantly, I’m going to tell you how we’re reshaping LoveLocked to help you make more money. Because we’re changing, and it’s for the better.’
Half past ten. Aimee could feel a pleasant ache in her back muscles, a welcome weariness in her arms. Her mind was beginning to quiet as well, the way it always did when she did the things she was supposed to. ‘Are you looking after yourself properly?’ Melinda had demanded, on her high horse in her designer kitchen. ‘Because you don’t seem right.’ Aimee had taken umbrage at that. Because she was doing all the self-care stuff, exercising and meditating and checking in with her doctor. Okay, the exercise had become walking one fat labrador, and the meditation had dwindled to mindfully stacking the dishwasher. And she’d ditched the medication, because it made her fat. But she was busy not doing the things that triggered her, and that was just as important.
Which included not dwelling on the past. ‘I think you need to take a look at yourself, Aimee, because this feels an awful lot like last time,’ Melinda had said. But that was exactly what Aimee didn’t need. There was a drawer at the bottom of her filing cabinet that she never opened, which contained all the writing she’d done during that dreadful year. Aimee couldn’t bring herself to throw it out, but she couldn’t bear to read it either. Just kept it locked away so the kids wouldn’t accidentally discover it.
Aimee continued to chop at the excess growth as she moved into the last row of shiraz. There was still a small buzzing in her head, the nagging thought that it might be a good idea to drive back out to the accident site and see for herself what was going on. Put her mind at rest that there wasn’t some kind of federal manhunt taking place on the other side of the river. But no. Aimee put the idea firmly out of her head and forced herself to think of things to be grateful for instead.
It was an easy list to make. Aimee mentally scrolled through the usual suspects. She was grateful for her understanding husband, her lovely easy daughter. The fact Byron wasn’t busy getting his heart broken by some careless lothario. Aimee genuinely didn’t have an issue with her son’s sexuality, but she did worry for him because of it. Australia had changed, but had it changed enough? She couldn’t bear the thought of him being bullied, or beaten up, just for being who he was. Or being taken advantage of. Or catching something. Heaven forbid.
Nearly there. Aimee began snipping with gusto as she saw open sky at the end of the row. She was grateful for her friends, even if Melinda was impossible sometimes. Her pubes hadn’t gone grey. The cat hadn’t thrown up in weeks. None of her family were ill, Aimee included. No matter what Melinda bloody implied. She kept moving forward, snapping haphazardly, until her house came into view. Aimee dropped the secateurs on the grass. Now there was something she was truly grateful for.
Aimee liked to joke that she’d married Nick for his house. Well, his parents’ house technically, but they’d already found a condo on the Gold Coast, had plans to take his dad’s arthritis to a more hospitable climate. Aimee kicked her boots off and climbed up onto the porch. Nick’s parents had moved within two months of the wedding, surprisingly eager to pass responsibility for the vineyard and its beautiful, impractical homestead on to the next generation. And Aimee had become the happy mistress of an early Victorian gold rush villa, an ornate wooden cake of a house, with elegant chimneys and iron filigree, wide sash windows and a deep wraparound veranda. Aimee lay contentedly on her stomach, staring out over the vines to the green-grey hills and bright sky, the kind of view that belonged on a postcard. The sheep that were supposed to keep the grass down ignored her from the shade of a cedar a previous Verratti had planted. Some of their trees were more than a hundred years old.
‘Just think,’ said Nick’s voice behind her. ‘We could have a dozen tables out there, full of people paying to watch our sheep poo.’
Aimee rolled over. ‘Buses full of Chinese tourists tearing up the grass,’ she said. ‘We wouldn’t even need the sheep.’
He dropped down beside her on the cool stone. ‘A cellar door would open us up to a whole new segment of drinker,’ he said. ‘A generation looking to discover their own wines rather than just buy what’s in the shop.’
‘A new generation demanding to taste everything with no intention of buying,’ said Aimee, falling into their familiar banter. ‘Asking us to pop the cork on a seventy-five-dollar bottle of shiraz, then deciding nah, they’ll take the cute miniature prosecco after all.’
‘Extra revenue streams,’ murmured Nick. ‘Food, coffee.’
‘People knocking on the door at all hours, expecting to be fed.’
‘An insight into new trends, what people really want.’ He slung an arm over her.
‘A reputation for not being serious, just a tourist winery.’ She rolled into him.
‘More money for university and holidays.’
‘More debt.’
‘Word of mouth, viral marketing.’
‘People putting nasty reviews on Trip Advisor because we didn’t tell them the quiche wasn’t gluten-free.’
‘Expansion,’ he whispered, biting her earlobe.
‘Exhaustion,’ she countered, opening her neck up to be nuzzled.
‘Inevitable,’ he stated, pushing his hand beneath her singlet, where the fat rolls had accumulated a charming coating of damp sweat.
‘Inconceivable,’ said Aimee, gently pushing the hand away. But smiling. They’d had this argument for years, and would have it for a dozen more. She sat up, pulling her top down over her flabby tummy. ‘Coke?’ she asked. ‘I’m having one.’
Lou started with the cupboards above the sink — the hated Royal Doulton. Saucers, teacups, milk jugs, it all went in the bin. The sugar bowl still had actual sugar cubes in it, perfectly square. Just like her parents. ‘Think how much room we’re going to have,’ she said. ‘God, I can’t believe we didn’t do this earlier.’
Tansy was still standing in the middle of the kitchen, contemplating the rubbish bin. ‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘Let’s not chuck it all away.’ She fished out a tea cup. ‘This is still good.’
‘Don’t care,’ said Lou.
‘Nah, but we could sell it.’ Tansy closed her hands around a stack of gilded plates before Lou could let them fall. ‘Stick it online. Some of this stuff is probably worth heaps.’
Lou paused. ‘Tansy, you’re brilliant.’ She set the plates down on the kitchen table, gave her daughter’s cheek a peck that Tansy didn’t duck away from. ‘Do you know how to do that?’
Tansy gave her a look. Lou chose not to wonder how many of her own possessions had already found their way into cyberspace.
‘You stack and sort, I’ll photograph and upload,’ said Tansy, ducking into the hallway. She came back with her laptop. ‘I’ve already got an eBay account.’
Of course she did. ‘But can I still chuck the stuff that’s really gross?’ Lou had found the smashing cathartic.
Tansy smiled at her indulgently. ‘Yes, you may,’ she said. ‘But check with me first.’
They worked surprisingly well as a team, through the rest of the morning and past lunch. Lou’s damaged hand meant they were moving at roughly the same pace, as she slowly cleared cupboards and drawers, keeping only the very basics to tide them over. A couple of knives and forks. A few of the less offensive pl
ates. Next to Tansy, well-used kitchen gear piled up: CorningWare and Tupperware and Pyrex, dappled with the tide marks of a thousand shepherd’s pies. ‘Corningware is huge, Mum, you have no idea. People will give us thirty-five bucks a dish. Do we have the boxes?’
Of course they had the boxes. Her mother never threw anything away. Lou started to hum.
Cake stands, cruet sets, biscuit tins. Loaf pans, tablecloths, napkin rings. Laminate coasters, depicting a pastoral Britain none of them had ever visited. A heavy crystal decanter — ‘Mum, put it down’ — and a set of sherry glasses so tiny Lou wondered how anyone in the house had ever got drunk. Tansy assessed it all with an auctioneer’s eye, rescuing items that Lou had binned — ‘That’s not junk, that’s vintage’ — and occasionally intervening to place bits and pieces back in drawers. ‘We still need to cook, Mum. We’re getting rid of the memories, not starving ourselves out.’
