The Grand Tour

by Olivia Wearne

  Angela hemmed meekly, as though Bernard’s outburst had frightened her into submission. ‘Actually, I could use a place to stay for a few days, maybe a week. My floors are being done.’ She swatted the air, despite Bernard not being able to see. ‘But that’s a whole ’nother thing.’

  ‘Angela, I’m so sorry. Mia was in an accident.’

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘She fell down some stairs. She’s been in hospital. I’m bringing her home today.’

  ‘Oh, forget it, Bernard. Forget I asked …’

  ‘Any other time …’

  ‘There won’t be another time. I can manage just fine on my own.’

  ‘Angela—’

  She hung up and tossed her phone onto the passenger seat. Feeling this put insufficient distance between herself and her brother, she shoved the implement down to the far reaches of her Oroton tote.

  Angela slowed as she passed a café; one of those rustic little food-store affairs with seats as uncomfortable as packing crates—that oftentimes were packing crates. She chose a small table alongside a display of homemade jams and opened the newspaper. Carol’s petulant face was staring back at her. If not for the death of a young West Australian soldier at his training barracks, or the railway network’s funding blowout, Ruby’s daughter might have been the lead story. The article used words such as ‘aggressive’ and ‘uncooperative’ to describe Carol’s behaviour—the reporter insinuating that the mother was unfit to parent, and the missing child would be better off in her noble nana’s care. Angela leant down to scrutinise Carol’s face. Why did she have to look so stroppy? Would it have killed her to show a modicum of concern for her daughter? And the drinking and the drugs; it certainly wasn’t normal for a distraught mother to be enjoying herself quite so fulsomely.

  The waiter, a handsome young man with even features and a chestnut forelock that persisted in falling rakishly across his left eye, delivered Angela’s latte. He leant over her shoulder to examine Carol’s picture, causing his customer to fairly swoon with the intimacy.

  ‘Did you see it on the news?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Champagne comedy. I mean that tubby bloke—that was pure slapstick, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ve met him. Trent. He’s just as stupid as he seems. A weak chin.’ Angela tapped her own jawbone by way of illustration. ‘I’ve never trusted a man with a weak chin. Trent had a chin like an earlobe.’

  ‘Where’d you meet him?’

  ‘His mother runs the caravan park. My friend and I stayed there.’

  ‘Did you see the little girl?’ the pretty barista interrupted, listening in from behind the coffee machine. ‘Wasn’t she staying at the caravan park?’

  ‘No.’ Angela turned the page. ‘No, I never saw her.’

  ‘Ask me, she’s better off with her gran,’ the waiter concluded, stepping out of Angela’s personal sphere.

  The lass removed a rack of steaming glasses from the dishwasher. ‘Who knows what goes on in other people’s lives? The woman’s child is missing. Whatever the reason, she’s probably going through hell.’

  The waiter grinned at Angela through his fringe, acknowledging they’d both been chastened. Angela smiled back, watching as he strode around the counter, stopping to tickle the girl’s bare midriff where her T-shirt had ridden up. Angela was reminded of a brutal truth: the image she held of herself was not what the external world saw. She was no longer a strikingly attractive, sassy blonde, but a sad vestige of such, a lined doll with a crepey neck and a stomach like a wheel of brie.

  Something about the boy caused her to think of Lucas. All this upset was making her maudlin. She and her stepson had never hit it off. Lucas was thirteen when she and Patrick married. It was the same hoary old tale: the son blaming the stepmother for ruining his parents’ lives. She could hardly blame him, forced as he was to endure the brunt of his mother’s self-pity, and left like a refugee to wander helpless and disoriented through the smouldering ruins of his broken family. Angela had done her best to buddy up with him; thankful he had a mother, albeit neurotic, in the background, sparing her any maternal endearment. Still, the boy saw through her attempts at camaraderie. He made it plain he had no intention of becoming her pal—making him possibly the only male Angela had never managed to win over. After a few years she stopped bothering, treating Lucas, on the occasional paternity visits, like a boarder staying at her guesthouse. It saddened Patrick that the two of them never managed to bond. He was almost as relieved as Angela when, at seventeen, Lucas decided he’d had enough of being handballed, and took up an apartment with a friend.

  The last time she’d seen him had been Patrick’s funeral. Lucas had spent the day with an arm around his grief-stricken mother, Nina. The reception was held at the golf club—neutral territory—although Angela had overseen all the arrangements. She’d subtly watched Lucas’s movements from across the function room, waiting for an opening. When Nina momentarily disentangled herself to latch onto a different waist, Angela made her move. She edged up to her stepson and suggested he might like to stop by the unit and help himself to his father’s possessions. Patrick had left everything to his dependent spouses—his son was expected to make his own way in life. But Angela was politely rebuffed—Lucas denying her this small means of alleviating her guilty conscience. Lucas was nothing if not well bred—‘coldly courteous’ as she described it to Ruby.

  Angela felt she owed it to Patrick to maintain civilities with his son. Yet the longer she put it off, the harder the task became.

  She scrolled through her phone’s contact list. There wasn’t a name among them she felt she could discuss her current quandary with. Only Lucas felt trustworthy. He was the only member of her entire acquaintance she could rely upon to be loyal and discreet. She would be sure to mention the fact to him; surely it had to count for something?

  Angela parked alongside a spartan apartment block. She checked her phone to make sure the address was correct. At the entry she baulked at a demoralising chart of buttoned nameplates—Lucas hadn’t bothered to insert his name into his allotted space. Did he no longer live here, or did he not want to be found? Neither option seemed particularly promising. Waiting for an answer to her buzz, Angela gazed penitently into a mean little camera disguised behind a sheet of tinted PVC. She hoped that somewhere within the building, Lucas might observe her and take pity. She buzzed three more times: the first two with a feeling of mortifying rudeness, the third for luck, certain no one was home to hear it. When the door clicked open, Angela suspected she must have pressed the wrong buzzer. She leant against the door and awkwardly manoeuvred her leopard-print suitcase through and into the apartment block’s foyer.

  A corridor of steely speak-no-evil doors brought Angela to number 9. She swiped at her forehead and noticed the beige paint on her fingertips—I’m sweating my face off. She glanced over her shoulder and when she turned back the door was open.

  ‘Angela,’ Lucas said dispassionately. His eyes slid southward to take in her suitcase. ‘Is this an ambush?’

  There was an air of monochrome maleness to Lucas’s home, an oppressive apathy broken only by the cartoon illustrations taped to the cheese-coloured walls. (Surely her stepson was long past superheroes?) The streaks of amber sunshine trying to shimmy in through closed vertical blinds served to augment the gloom. Angela perched on the edge of a massive L-shaped couch facing a screen so big it wouldn’t have seemed out of place hanging above a football stadium. ‘Have you considered getting glasses?’ she joked. A talk show was playing on mute: a sycophantic interviewer and a poker-faced movie star—the captivated audience hanging off every word as though at a Revival church meeting. Angela couldn’t imagine Lucas watching such a thing.

  She went to the window and moved aside a vertical flap to take in the view: a second apartment block, a mirror image of the one she was standing in.

  ‘Not much to see,’ Lucas said, returning with their drinks

  ‘There’s a few trees to the left out there. Or you
could watch your neighbours—that’s fun too.’

  She noticed Lucas had usurped her position on the couch. She settled on the opposite edge, leaving an expanse of microsuede between them. She clasped her orange juice and noted that her stepson was drinking whisky—at midday. She longed to join him. They spoke simultaneously, then quarrelled over who should repeat themselves first. Lucas seemed unnecessarily fractious. Angela wondered how many whiskies in he might be. She repeated that she hadn’t really expected him to be at home. He said he wasn’t working at present. He was taking some sick leave.

  ‘I could lend you something—to tide you over.’

  Lucas appeared mordantly amused by her proposal. Angela felt silly and overbearing. They sipped their drinks, the visitor debating whether to ask if she might have something a little stronger tipped into hers.

  ‘Is there any particular reason for the cartoons?’ She waved her glass in the direction of the action-packed walls.

  ‘They’re illustrations. I did them.’

  ‘Did you? How clever. I should have guessed, you were always scratching away at a drawing pad. Does it pay well?’

  ‘Sure, if you can find someone willing to pay.’

  Angela wondered if she should offer to buy one. They weren’t really her cup of tea. Perhaps she could buy one for Izzy, something a little less graphic. ‘Do you do commissions? I know a little girl who’s big into fairies.’ (She presumed this was true of Izzy.)

  ‘I don’t do fairies.’

  ‘Right, of course you don’t.’

  As the silence settled in, Angela realised she’d missed her window for introducing her conundrum: Speaking of little girls … did you happen to catch the news recently?

  Lucas broke out of his funk. ‘So did Bernard send you here, or what?

  ‘Bernard? As in my brother? Why would he send me?’

  Lucas twisted his face to imply he saw through her charade.

  ‘How do you even know Bernard?’

  Her stepson studied what little remained of his drink as he rolled the glass between his palms. What came next was completely beyond Angela’s wildest expectations.

  Lucas thrust his drink upon the coffee table and slapped his hands to his face, as though some internal pipe had burst and he was holding back the overspill. The sounds being emitted from behind his hands were hard to read, straddling that tricky line between laughter and tears—high emotion so closely verging. It was only due to the act of concealment that Angela suspected the latter. She, who had watched him stand dry-eyed through his father’s funeral, was at a complete loss how to handle the situation. She held her position, fingers interlocked around her knees, muscles aquiver with suppressed consolation, fearing that any move or gesture on her part might cause him to dart back into his shell.

  ‘I stuffed up,’ he said. ‘I walked out—and then she fell …’

  She? Angela couldn’t recall there being a girlfriend. ‘Sorry, honey, what was that last part?’

  Lucas had dropped his chin to his chest. ‘I’m useless, I’m weak—I couldn’t face her.’

  ‘Hang on.’ Angela was doing her best to follow, despite her bewilderment. ‘You said she fell. Are we talking about Mia? Bernard mentioned an accident.’

  ‘We fought and I walked out—she fell chasing after me. She has these ridiculously steep stairs …’

  ‘I thought he was bluffing—Why would you be fighting with Mia?’

  Lucas was deep in contrition. ‘I swore I’d never be like him. I swore I’d be better.’ He rapped his knuckles against his forehead in penitence.

  Angela presumed the comparison was with his father and thought it unfair. Patrick had been a softie, in the loving, gentle sense of the word. To Angela, whom he adored, he was a pushover, but he was never what she would term weak. He was resolute, steadfast in his convictions; guilty about the family he’d left behind, but not silly enough to let it sully the new life he’d made for himself. She fossicked around at her bra strap for a tissue. Lucas accepted her offering despite looking faintly appalled at where it had come from. He blew vigorously into the centre, sneaking a peek at its contents before tossing it onto the floor. Angela smiled, having caught a welcome glimpse of the surly teenager she remembered.

  She gave his knee a squeeze. ‘I’ve known you since you were a boy and I’ve always thought you were strong-willed, if not downright opinionated.’

  Lucas gave a great aqueous sniff.

  Angela held out her glass. ‘I think we could both use a refill. Only this time, add a lug of something transparent to mine.’

  Lucas re-emerged from the kitchen, grinning wanly. Angela received her drink and threw back a healthy swig.

  ‘Gin,’ she pronounced delightedly, smacking her lips. ‘Sorrows should always be drowned in tandem, don’t you think?’ She congratulated herself for arriving in the nick of time. There was a suggestion of the binger’s bloom tinting Lucas’s cheeks and nose, although that may have had more to do with the crying. She was ready for her debrief. ‘So, when did you become friendly with Bernard and Mia?’

  Lucas bent down to retrieve the crumpled tissues from the carpet. Angela was disturbed to note the patch of baldness creeping out from the centre of his crown, like a secluded crop circle viewed from above.

  ‘I’ve been dating Mia for the last month or so.’

  The news was cataclysmic. ‘No you haven’t! Did Bernard know?’

  ‘Of course. They’re separated. It wasn’t like some illicit affair.’

  ‘They broke up!’ Information both shocking and gratifying. ‘When?’

  Lucas was puzzled. ‘They have been for over a year. You didn’t know?’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’ She took a slug of orange-flavoured gin and then stretched forward to slide her glass onto the coffee table. ‘You’ll have to bring me up to speed.’ She unzipped her ankle boots and pulled them off, tucking her feet up beneath her. ‘I have a better relationship with my podiatrist than I do with Bernard,’ she conceded, reaching for her glass again.

  ‘What’s the story there?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain to an only child. My best friend is one too. I used to think it was our age gap, but now I think it’s something more. Something to do with loyalty.’ She sighed and sipped her drink, the therapy session having seamlessly been transferred onto her. ‘He was the favourite. As the firstborn, it drove me crazy. Our mother was such a cold fish, yet when it came to Bernard she seemed to have all these reserves of affection she’d never bothered plumbing before.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Died, just after I left home. Bernard was twelve. As a salesman he was never around much anyway. So, I suppose Mother was overcompensating for that. But what killed me about Bernard is that he refused to acknowledge the imbalance. He’s never once conceded that I was passed over in favour of him. I was tossed aside and he just lapped up all the attention and praise as though it was his birthright. At the very least he might have said something, I don’t mean an apology—it wasn’t his fault—just a bit of sympathy.’

  ‘He was young.’

  ‘Even as an adult. Ask him, he’ll tell you he had a perfectly normal, perfectly happy upbringing. It drives me crazy.’

  ‘You left home when he was twelve.’

  ‘I’m talking about afterward. I wanted to be friends. He didn’t want anything to do with me. He was always fobbing me off. It was like I lost a mother, a father and a brother. Ugh …’ Angela fluttered her hands like wings to fan her face. ‘I’m sorry. This was supposed to be about you.’ She dragged her fingertips beneath her eyes to erase any smudged mascara. ‘Tell me about you and Mia. No, wait …’ She emptied her glass and held it out to him. ‘Pour me a top up and then tell me all about it.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Ruby conducted a drive-by tour of Melbourne’s central grid, slowing to admire Federation Square, Flinders Street Station, the Shrine and any passing building assumed to be of sightseeing significance. Izzy loved ridi
ng high above the other cars. She championed every red light that drew them to a standstill, enabling the lowly foot traffic to glance up and witness her in her superior carriage. The Winnebago was a moving billboard—its passengers were GOING PLACES. Ruby drove up the hill to the Botanical Gardens. Her tourist guidebook informed her of parking bays there large enough to stow their cumbersome vehicle.

  The pair swung hands as they strolled across a crest of crisp green lawn.

  In the park’s cafeteria, Izzy felt suddenly raw and self-conscious. She clung to Ruby’s hip, hiding her face against the pressing crowd of daytrippers. Any member of this pushy, mean-faced horde could finger her as a fugitive. Even the cabinets of illuminated lunch options—sandwiches sealed in clear cases, golden pies and pasties with fluted crusts, and storybook cakes draped in thick icing—failed to distract from the peril of their situation. She maintained a low profile, pretending, like those around her, to be battling indecision—all the while cowering beneath the protective plastic shield of Angela’s sun visor. They shuffled another step forward.

  Izzy twisted into her grandma’s stomach and mewled like an infant. ‘We have to get out of here.’

  Ruby was unhearing. She ruffled Izzy’s hair and placed an order for sandwiches and juices, gently dislodging herself from her human cinch belt to enable access to her handbag.

  Heading back to the Winnebago after lunch, Izzy stopped short. ‘I haven’t got any sunscreen on.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. We haven’t been outdoors for long.’

  ‘But Angela said to wear it every day. When we were saying goodbye, she said it was the biggest mistake of her life.’

  ‘Angela is prone to exaggeration. She was talking about aging, not getting sunburnt.’

  ‘So your roofs didn’t fall in?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When we were parked in your driveway, and you and Angela were just sitting there for ages in the front seat, not speaking—you said, let me know when our units are ready. And she said, they’re probably replacing the roof by now.’