CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The ocean sparkled on the right, flashing Morse code sunbeams, as the Winnebago followed the coast. Angela shut her eyes to the light but the flickering continued behind her closed lids. Beside her, Ruby wore dark wraparound sunglasses to protect against the glare. They were heading home.
They stopped at the foreshore to stretch their achy legs, removing their shoes to enjoy the feel of smooth cool sand, as flawless as hourglass grains, between their toes. Angela fell behind, looking for shells. She stopped intermittently to bob for specimens, brushing and blowing like a fastidious archaeologist, pocketing the find or throwing it away. When they returned to the vehicle, they took it in turns to support one another, standing like one-legged wading birds to dust off their feet before replacing their shoes.
The weather had turned by the time they pulled into Kingston for morning tea. Inclement November had transformed the quaint sunny fishing village of four days ago into a mariner’s stormy legend. Angela insisted they pause at the giant lobster to rectify an earlier oversight and let her photograph Ruby standing alongside it—her hair was blown upright against the squall. They staggered for the shelter of a nearby café, clinging to arms and elbows, using each other as shields against the sharp southerly blowing in off the sea. Having refuelled with coffee and fist-sized muffins that defied being eaten by crumbling upon contact, they were happy to resume their journey, snug within their travelling conservatory as the wind rocked and spat and whinged to be let in.
The travellers decided to shave some time off the drive and cut back inland along the Western Highway. After an hour of monotonous arid terrain, broken only by triptychs of towering silos, they were regretting their decision. Angela rifled through the glove box in search of some music. She cursed as discs tumbled out onto her feet.
‘You’re still upset,’ Ruby noted.
Angela returned to the upright, her hands full of discs. ‘Of course I’m upset. Did you notice he managed to say please? “Please stop texting me.” How typically Bernard. Even when he’s callous, he’s civil. So that it seems unreasonable for you to be offended.’
Ruby thought Angela was being unreasonable. But then, having no siblings of her own, she wasn’t to know how sensitive the relationship could be.
‘I’m not sure I understand. Was it just because he was spoilt and you weren’t that you’re still bitter? Because I would have thought that was better for you—character building.’
Angela fumbled with the CD cases, trying to wedge them back into the glove box. ‘Sure, I might have gotten over it if he hadn’t been so bloody lucky as well. Everything just fell into Bernard’s lap.’
‘So, you’re jealous?’
‘No! Oh, all right, yes, I’m jealous as a jumbuck. If he’d only been jealous of me too. Or at least hadn’t shut me out. He was always so, you know, so calm, so bloody rational. He hated it when I was emotional. He made me seem crazy.’ She ran a hand through the air an inch in front of her face, swiping it of all expression. ‘He’s like a mannequin.’
‘Aren’t they the qualities that drew you to Patrick? His composure, his restraint?’
‘Yes. But Patrick was sensitive too. He could be sympathetic. He was brimming with sympathy.’
‘I often worry that’s how people see me,’ Ruby admitted, ‘like Bernard, not Patrick. I wonder if people think of me as insensitive or unfeeling. I’m not very good at relationships, forming bonds. I don’t have the patience for it.’
‘You are quite antisocial.’
‘I’d call it happy in my own company. And I wasn’t talking about acquaintances, I meant serious relationships.’
‘Oh Ruby.’ Angela was bored now the conversation had moved away from her and her grievances. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. We’re close as close.’
‘That’s true. I think of you as family.’
Angela’s fingers were walking across the CD spines in search of a title. ‘The very fact that you could ask such a question sets you apart from Bernard. It would never occur to him to consider his own behaviour. He’s such a cold fish. I don’t know how that Mia puts up with him.’ Angela prised her selection from the pile. ‘She probably only stays with him for his fame—likes being Mrs Bernard Barkley.’
‘She was pretty successful in her own right.’
‘Whatever.’ Angela lifted the disc from its case and inserted it into the player. ‘Let’s stop now. I said I didn’t want to talk about him.’ She attempted to work the stereo, prodding buttons and twiddling dials. Ruby leant forward to press play and a symphonic blare assaulted them through the speakers. Angela listened briefly to each track, searching for a tune to meet her mood. Eventually, she settled on a song. She lolled back in her seat and began singing along to ‘The Jellicle Ball’ in her high, tinny falsetto, dipping her head from side to side in time to the music.
In Bordertown the baffled members of a local bowls club turned to witness the Winnebago cruise past, a chorus of angry Frenchmen singing of revolution blaring from its speakers.
Taking their cue from their guidebook, Ruby and Angela stopped to lunch at a roadhouse run by the local Indigenous community. They sat within hearing range of an elderly couple eating soup, and three young mothers jogging infants of varying sizes and shades. Both women assumed strained, convivial faces while placing their order with the young waitress, who managed to transcribe their order despite it being entangled in polite prattle. They beamed at everything, hoping to appear open and easygoing and polished off the generous serves in their entirety.
‘Clean as a baby’s conscience,’ Angela said to the waitress as she handed up her empty plate.
Ruby found it ludicrous how eager to please they were. ‘Colonial guilt,’ she murmured to Angela.
‘Don’t look at me. I’m second generation. I had nothing to do with them losing their land.’
Still, the need to atone pulled them to the shelves of merchandise: a selection of locally produced craft in dusty reds and ochres. Angela bought a little boomerang magnet, while Ruby dithered, glancing over her shoulder to note several sets of eyes watching her enquiringly—friends of the artists perhaps? She didn’t think she could get away with only spending a few dollars. She contemplated buying a painting but Angela told her not to be ridiculous. ‘What do you want with a lot of dots?’ And so ended up with a hand-carved wooden bowl, which she absolutely didn’t need.
On the way out of town they pulled into a service station. Ruby found the Winnebago took an eternity to fill; sucking on its metal teat until it gave a little burp to signal it was satiated. Angela took the opportunity to stretch her legs, tottering on stiff limbs into the convenience store. She appraised the racks of attention-grabbing confectionery, a plethora of portion sizes in psychedelic packaging. She took her time in deciding—it was like being a girl again with a penny in her pocket. The various gums and lozenges were perfect for car travel; both she and Ruby liked to a have a packet lying open on the dash.
Having climbed into her copilot’s seat, she used her teeth to wrench the corner off a packet of Columbines. In the rear-view mirror, she watched Ruby massage her eyes with forefinger and thumb. Angela would have offered to take the helm but was terrified of being in control (out of control) of the hulking motor home. She felt somewhat sheepish about her role as navigator, which she conducted with blatant ineptitude, scanning unintelligible tour maps, umming and ahhing and muttering ‘That can’t be right’ as she turned the diagram around in her lap, until such time as Ruby grew impatient and pulled to the side of the road to consult the map herself.
Sucking on a caramel, Angela leant back against the headrest, careful not to muss her hair. A vision of Patrick surfaced, one of many unwanted reveries that had plagued her since leaving Ballarat, as though he meant to accompany his widow on her adventure, live vicariously through her. It seemed unfair that he should choose now to haunt her, when for the last two years she’d gone about her simple, solitary routine as though she’d never
been married at all. Happy to eke out her days watching more television than was considered civilised, scanning the pages of her subscription magazines and amending her recipes to single serves. Whenever she happened to think of her husband it was in reference to something he might have said, or in trying to recall where he might have put something: the screwdriver needed to unscrew the light fixture when a bulb blew, the allen key to tighten a kitchen chair, a torch or a paper clip. She stood with hands on hips in the narrow hallway where she’d been wandering the rooms in search of the absent object and spared a thought for Patrick as he attended to the hundreds of little duties that maintaining a house necessitated, trying to ascertain if she’d seen him with the item and where he might have replaced it. Other than these passing reminders, he rarely entered her thoughts. When mutual acquaintances referred to him, Angela readily responded to their memories, laughing at his stubborn streak, agreeing he was indeed a gentle soul, summoning merely the faintest whiff of recollection, as though Patrick were a character on a long-running soap opera she followed.
She’d described their first encounter to Ruby one winter’s morning to the accompaniment of her gas heater purring in the background. The narrative played like a winsome romantic comedy; she and Patrick, their younger selves, felt so distant as to have become strangers—attractive, charismatic strangers. They met at the Carlton Gardens, an urban oasis bordered on all sides by stretches of urgent traffic. Orderly paths dissected the park’s grassy pelt, regimental garden beds and shady elms dotted about. At the head of the gardens was the Royal Exhibition Building, pale and ornate as an ice sculpture, its proud dome resting like an egg in an elaborate cup. They were filming a commercial, something bright and cheerful, featuring lots of brunettes and brassy blondes dressed in Day-Glo colours—a throwback to the swinging sixties for an eighties hosiery company. Angela was in charge of applying swaths of sheeny pastels to the mannequins’ faces.
Patrick was eating his lunch on one of the benches set at intervals along the path like stations on a train line. As luck would have it, he was in Melbourne for a pharmacy convention being held in the Exhibition Building. He ran the second largest chemist in Ballarat and liked to keep abreast of things.
When he was finished, he bagged his rubbish and popped it into a bin before walking over to appraise the spectacle going on in the Roman fountain. He noticed Angela standing off to one side, watching the proceedings with striped arms folded across a black tunic, and stepped crab-like across to speak with her.
‘Why aren’t you in there, swanning around with the other girls?’
Angela placed a hand to her collarbone in a show of false modesty. ‘Not a model, merely the make-up artist.’
Patrick pretended to be gobsmacked.
To Ruby, Angela conceded, ‘Anyone in the industry would have told you I needed an extra six inches to be a clothes horse.’
Patrick fired off the usual questions: what are you filming, and when will it air? After hearing the somewhat disappointing response, they stood together, contemplatively watching the girls splash and frolic and kick their colourful legs, until Angela was called upon to repair their waterlogged faces.
Patrick moved off. Angela liked to think of him sparing a final lingering glance at the elfin ash-blond standing on tippy-toes to touch-up the face of a gangling six-foot doll. For her part, she watched him walk away, noting his barrel-chested, thin-legged physique, like that of a circus strongman. ‘Of solid stock,’ her father would have labelled him; men made for tweed and rural gambits—redundant in today’s world of high-powered vehicles and gym memberships.
When she returned to her beauty case to fetch a fresh tube of mascara she found the note: In the event that you might be as captivated as I … under which Patrick had inscribed his name and number.
They spent the next thirty years together, Patrick leaving behind an irascible wife and young son in order to devote himself to worshipping his new bride. Angela took to her pedestal like a cat to a velvet cushion. Patrick had arrived on the scene not a moment too soon. At thirty-two, Angela feared her powers of attraction were on the wane; there was an unshakable whiff of desperation clinging to her, despite (or perhaps on account of) her joie de vivre. The designers and directors and admen with whom she mingled were all very well for a bit of slap and tickle, but they’d married patient, long-suffering wives years before they’d made a name for themselves. And Angela was tired—she enjoyed her job, but had trouble maintaining her upper-crust lifestyle on a working-class wage. She feared the new generation of bright young things nipping at her heels, both for her job and her lovers. She was ready to settle. And Patrick, with his agreeable face and thick head of hair, was earthy enough for her to put down roots.
For the most part, their three decades together had been as content and as close to love as was necessary. As far as Angela was concerned it was never intended to be a great passionate romance. She scoffed at the notion of soul mates, far preferring the warmth and security of a caregiver, a relationship akin to a tentative parent administering to a lame child. Perhaps this was why she didn’t experience earth-shattering bereavement upon Patrick’s death. She’d lost a dear companion; it was unfortunate but endurable. There was also the relief of knowing she wouldn’t be required to share in the long, arduous process of his dying. She wasn’t sure if she was up to the task and dreaded being discovered as cowardly and unfeeling. What’s more, she secretly savoured the prospect of being single again, as though a second edition to her life had been released, with reams of blank pages to fill as she chose.
It was only when touring, as the endless stretch of freeway rolled out beneath the Winnebago’s tyres like a red carpet unravelled in honour of approaching royalty, that Patrick arose to prey on Angela’s mind. His memory rebuked her for her neglect and beleaguered her with the enormity of his absence, the vastness of his non-existence, reminding her that she too was destined to play out a similar disappearing act. She struggled to banish him from her thoughts. Until such time as he could be evoked without pangs of contrition and the burden of dread, he would have to be ignored.
Ruby heaved herself up into the driver’s seat, fighting the wind for control of the door, which she eventually managed to wrest away and slam. The van shuddered. She thrust her keys into the ignition. ‘It must be the day for nasty messages. Carol just left me a doozy.’
She held out her phone for Angela to have a listen, hoping that sharing might somehow diminish her anxiety. Angela’s face assumed a portrait of wide-eyed alarm as she listened to Ruby’s daughter rail about how Izzy had set fire to their home, giving her third-degree burns in the process, and then scooted off happy as you like to live with their bible-bashing neighbour. And now Carol was all alone. And needed a mother, even one as hopeless as Ruby. Because she couldn’t go on, she couldn’t possibly go on living with things as bad as they were.
Angela whistled, happy to hand back the explosive device. ‘Good lord. Do you think it’s as bad as all that?’
‘Who can say?’ Ruby started the engine. ‘But based on the turmoil I’m experiencing, there’s nothing faulty with my emotions.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The salesgirl watched Bernard approach; a task that required some patience on her part given the expanse of floor space and the fact that Bernard’s attention was constantly diverted by racks of wine he’d failed to notice. Fortunately it was mid-morning on a Friday, the hordes that would arrive at five pm to lay in supplies for the weekend were only on the day’s first coffee break.
While she scanned and bagged, Bernard perused a stand of garish metallic gift bags, tall and narrow to envelop each precious bottle. Having flipped through the assortment twice and found them all objectionably ugly for varying reasons, he slipped off the top bag and tossed it onto the counter.
The girl scanned it and popped it alongside his purchase.
Bernard slipped a hand into his pocket to retrieve his wallet.
‘I saw you on my way to work today,
’ she chirruped.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘I saw you on the way to work.’
Bernard did a mental inventory of everywhere he’d been that morning. She may have spotted him walking to the supermarket, or having coffee perhaps?
‘I would have thought you didn’t need to buy wine anymore.’ A smile ran across her face, large teeth, slightly overlapping, strange to see in this day of compulsory orthodontics where people have been known to take out second mortgages to achieve oral perfection in their young; worse still was the mawkish metal-mouthed adults who served him in banks and post offices. (Did their parents not love them enough to part with thousands, and so ensure their successful futures?)
‘I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.’
‘You’re Bernard Barkley, right?’
‘I am. But I also need to continue buying wine.’
‘So don’t you drink what you advertise?’
He handed her his credit card. ‘I’ll drink anything.’
‘You’re on the billboard above the Sturt Street servo, a big picture of you holding a glass of wine. It says something about how you love Tenterfield Estate.’
‘I’ll be damned. That was quick.’
‘Don’t you get any for free?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say.’
The salesgirl flashed another crooked grin then turned her head away, dismissing him in favour of her iPhone, which she kept stashed beneath the register.
Bernard wandered down Sturt Street. When he reached the service station he bought himself a packet of chewing gum and pretended to open it on the footpath while he glanced at the billboard overhead. It was one thing to be featured on a billboard; it was another to be caught standing beneath it admiring yourself.
All in all, the poster was a major improvement over the one on which he’d promoted the news. There he’d appeared a little off kilter, dithering even; here he was satisfied and cocksure. He’d been plastered when the image was taken.
The Grand Tour Page 10
