The Olive Sisters

by Amanda Hampson

  ‘Bacio! Bacio!’ shouted Luigi drunkenly. Lorraine nudged him to be quiet.

  Isabelle took Jack’s hand as she stood and drew him to his feet. For a moment he was transfixed by the image of the plastic bride and groom on the top of the cake. He had a strange sense of being just a groom, any groom … that he could just as easily be sitting on the other side of the table, watching another man stand and kiss Isabelle.

  The cake was cut and served. Franco made a short speech, very different, Jack imagined, from the one he might have made several months ago. The wedding party seemed subdued afterwards. Alberto, sensing the time was right, took up his guitar and Rosanna leapt to her feet. ‘Yes, Papa, let’s dance.’

  ‘First the newlyweds,’ said Franco, not looking up as he rolled a cigarette.

  Jack led Isabelle out onto the lawn and took her in his arms. Everything and everyone around him fell away as his wife’s soft body relaxed against his, her cheek resting on Jack’s shoulder. Rocco and Erminia, lighter on their feet than Jack could have ever guessed, led the way for the other guests.

  Jack’s mother, looking a little flushed, danced rather awkwardly with Snow. His father never danced. Joseph lost no time partnering Rosanna, and the Roland sisters waltzed together while Mrs Mack and her husband swooped about the lawn like a couple of professionals on show.

  The evening was still, the sky as smooth and pale as a moonstone. Reluctant for the day to end, the guests languished over coffee and cigarettes. Alberto sang softly as he idly strummed his guitar. Luigi and Lorraine could be heard in the distance having a blazing row. Rosanna and Joseph had disappeared. It was time for Jack and Isabelle to leave.

  Franco stood smoking a cigarette at the back gate, his gaze tilted towards the hills. Jack wandered over and leant on the gate. He could see the faint outline of a sickle moon almost transparent against the sky.

  ‘I am thinking,’ said Franco softly after some time, ‘I am remembering my wife’s mother. She say her daughter and granddaughters going to Australia, it was like a death in the family. I was young. Now I understand. This is my punishment.’ He opened the gate and walked into the field beyond. Jack watched as he slowly walked the length of the grove. He stopped now and then to lay his hand on a branch or limb with reverence and affection, as if greeting old friends, as if saying goodbye. He touched each tree with love and with sorrow.

  Seven

  I GATHER UP the coffee set I smashed so childishly on the night of the storm and take the pieces out into the morning sun on the front verandah. Bringing out a chair and small table, I lay out the pieces on some newspaper. It’s not all smashed, but it’s no longer complete. Forever flawed by my anger. It takes me more than an hour to assemble and glue together two cups. I would never have believed I had the patience.

  Just as I decide to have a break and take Dog for a walk there is the sound of a truck coming up the driveway. Dear God, let it not be Leeton again. The truck, which has a small tractor on the back, pulls up in front of the house and a man jumps down from the cab. Looking past the battered akubra, the hair that needs a decent cut, a two-day growth and generally sweaty appearance, he’s quite good-looking – in a hewn sort of way. He is, however, the antithesis of everything I find attractive in a man – not that I’m looking for one. I can already glean his idea of entertainment is watching the rugby with a slab of beer for company; he loves country music and eats petrol-station food. (For the record, my ideal man flies business class, wears Armani and knows his pinot noir from his shiraz. Plus, he always smells good.)

  His name is Joe Oldfield. He tips his hat and I find myself a little breathless.

  ‘Mum suggested you needed some mowing done.’ He gestures towards the lawn.

  ‘I’m not sure … what sort of costs are involved?’ I move down the steps, trying to remember if I brushed my mop this morning but willing myself not to check.

  ‘I’ll do it for nothing this time. A welcome-home gift.’

  ‘Hmm … the old loss-leader marketing strategy. You just want to show me how good the place looks and then I’ll think I can’t live without you – it – the mowing,’ I stammer, all hot and bothered.

  ‘It’s a gift, really.’ He smiles.

  ‘Can I think about it?’

  ‘Look, if you decide within the next two minutes I’ll throw in a free set of steak knives.’ He folds his arms and waits. ‘The thing is, it’s too high for your lawnmower, especially Jack’s old one. If I whip around and slash the lawn now, you’ll be able to handle it yourself next time.’

  ‘Me? Mow the lawn?’

  He throws his head back and laughs. ‘What about if, instead of the steak knives, I throw in my Introduction to Lawnmowing seminar?’

  ‘Oh, you deal-maker, you. How can I refuse?’ I dimple against my will.

  I’d like to say that I turn out to be an excellent student but the truth is that lawnmowing makes cooking look easy. It’s noisy, dangerous and dirty and the actual starting of Jack’s old mower requires a level of hand–brain–eye–foot coordination that proves completely beyond me.

  Joe simply puts a foot on the mower and with one deft flick of the wrist the thing snarls into life. I have trouble working out which foot to plant on the machine and the starter cord, so taut and responsive in Joe’s hand, is utterly lifeless in mine. The man’s patience is highly commendable but in the end even he sees it is hopeless. He throws a couple of ramps down from his truck, backs his tractor off and in fifteen minutes the lawn looks like a lawn. He drives his tractor back onto the truck and secures it on the tray.

  ‘I wish I had a beer to offer you, after that hot work,’ I call out to him.

  ‘I don’t normally drink beer quite this early in the day. A cup of tea’d hit the spot, though, if it’s not too much trouble.’

  He sits on the front steps and waits while I make the tea. When I come back Dog has his head in Joe’s lap, having his ears rubbed. I put the cups down and sit on the top step. My hair looks fine – I checked. Not that it matters.

  ‘It’s beautiful here,’ he says. ‘It’s none of my business, but I hope you’re not going to sell out to Leeton. He’ll carve the whole place up, pull out the trees – it’d be a bloody shame. There’s a business in olives these days.’

  ‘So are you a contender?’

  ‘You’re a very suspicious woman, aren’t you?’ He sounds hurt.

  ‘Not at all, I just like to know what people’s agendas are.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have an agenda. I’m not motivated by any of the things you might imagine. I am a free man. I just know that you don’t plant olives for yourself, you plant them for your grandchildren, and whether you like it or not, that’s you.’ He throws back the last of his tea and stands up abruptly. ‘How about you don’t assume anything about me and I won’t assume anything about you?’

  Before I can thank him he stalks to his truck, reverses out and drives away. My, people come and go quickly around here – is it me?

  The heady aroma of freshly mown grass is quite intoxicating; I pad around the damp lawn barefoot, just for fun. Enough of that. It’s 11.15 on a Monday morning. Without the demands of work, time seems to stretch and gape. What the hell should I be doing?

  I need to write my CV. There’s plenty of time, though, the interview’s not until Friday. I could unpack some more of my stuff. Finish gluing up the coffee set. Joe’s eyes were a rather distracting shade of green. Deep and dangerous. One could easily drown in there. Then there is the smooth creamy skin of his forearms to think about. I decide to visit Joy.

  Joy, I discover, lives in a shed. It’s a shed out the back of the house she used to live in, now occupied by Joe’s brother, his wife and four children. She doesn’t seem at all apologetic or embarrassed about the fact that she lives in a shed, and doesn’t even appear to think it odd, or that I might think it odd. It’s like a studio apartment. Her bed, a small table and chairs, a two-seater floral sofa, a couple of occasional tables and a little improvised kitch
en are all in one room. Her windows look out across the paddocks and one side has a tilting door that opens onto a carefully tended vegetable garden. It reeks of quiet contentment. I’m envious.

  She makes me tea and, while we’re chatting, whips up a batch of scones and slips them into her tiny bench-top oven. She throws a fresh cloth on the table and sets out the cups and saucers, side plates, napkins and homemade fig jam.

  ‘Soooo,’ I say casually. ‘Joe came and mowed the lawns today. At your request, I understand.’

  ‘It was in need of doing, dear. Don’t want you to have an altercation with a red-bellied black, do we?’ she says briskly. ‘Joe’s a good boy. Knew Jack quite well, you know.’ She sits down and pours the tea.

  ‘Well, any friend of Jack’s is a friend of mine.’ I give a brittle laugh.

  ‘Now, you’re being a little bit sarcastic there, aren’t you?’ Her cup clinks sharply on the saucer as she puts it down and looks at me over the top of her glasses. She gives me the same disappointed look my mother used to employ when I had ‘spoilt things’.

  I feel seriously chastised. ‘Sorry. Sorry, Joy. This is a very confusing time for me. I’m not really myself at the moment.’

  ‘People are only trying to help, you know, dear.’

  ‘I know. Tell me about Joe.’

  ‘Anything Joe wants you to know he’ll tell you himself,’ she says firmly.

  I try again. ‘Tell me about Jack.’

  ‘I can’t imagine I could tell you anything about Jack that you don’t already know.’

  ‘I hadn’t seen him for thirty years.’

  ‘Thirty years! Good Lord!’ She thinks for a moment and then says quietly, ‘Do you mind my asking if there was a particular reason why you didn’t see him? I half assumed he saw you when he went down to Sydney so often. Did you have a falling out?’

  Now it’s my turn to be cagey. ‘It’s complicated.’ Truthfully, it is complicated, but it is also as simple as I forgot about him. Having cut him out of my life, I did, eventually, sort of forget about him. I have a great capacity for neatly cutting people out of my life and, not for the first time, I regret it. This time I cut to the bone. I have come to realise in the last few days that I’ve missed out on the opportunity to get to know Jack in a role beyond that of my absent father. I have forfeited the right to even say that I knew him. I wish it were otherwise.

  Joy leans her elbows on the table and taps her fingers on her lips as though arranging her words in exactly the right order. I can see she was pretty once, when the grey curls were blonde, the skin peachy and not yet mapped by a thousand small worries. She has the sweet smile of a pretty child.

  ‘Jack had his fair share of altercations with people but he was a fair-minded man,’ she begins. ‘He was a bit changeable. He could be generous one day and like a bear with a sore head the next. I suppose you’d say he didn’t suffer fools.’ She slides her hand over mine. ‘He loved that farm, dear. He’d be thrilled you’ve come home.’

  I haven’t the heart to tell her I’m not ‘home’ in the real sense of the word. When the solicitors, who went to some trouble to track me down, wrote to tell me that Jack had died and left me the farm I thought it truly was a gift from someone in heaven. I had heard stories of the farm. My mother always promised to take me there but, as with so many things, I suspect she had no intention of doing so. She could appear willing but possessed a sort of passive resistance that made her mysteriously immovable. She never mentioned olives. Still, she never mentioned she had a sister. No wonder we never came here – too many secrets. But here it was, being delivered to me at a time when I was sliding slowly down the cliff face of my aspirations towards the murky waters of bankruptcy. Caught up in my money troubles, I barely gave a moment’s thought to my father’s death when I heard about my inheritance. Any flicker of regret was snuffed out by my old bitterness. The truth is that I was online Googling real estate prices in Duffy’s Creek within minutes. Bloody Leeton’s right, it’s worth bugger-all.

  I get a call from Diane. She hears a little tension in my voice, tells me I need to listen to my body. As I lie in bed waiting for sleep to come, I listen. I can’t imagine my body telling me anything I want to hear. All I hear is the sound of the blood rushing through my veins, like a torrent in my ears. Or perhaps I’m just drowning in my own self-absorption.

  In the morning I get a call from Sarah in London; it’s midnight there and she’s just arrived home from work. She’s worried about me. I’m worried about her, working until midnight. Next, I get a call from Lauren to tell me I’ll have to get my act together if I’m serious about the job. She thinks I am definitely losing the plot; I could have told her that Mr Arnold had cancelled her mobile phone service. She’s right, I could have.

  I get a call from Joy. I can hardly think straight with all these calls. If I am really desperate for work, she says, there is a lady by the name of Deirdre who does house cleaning locally. Deirdre doesn’t like to clean on her own and her cleaning buddy has moved to Queensland.

  ‘I’m helping her out at the moment but I’ve got the tennis ladies’ Christmas luncheon, highlight of my social calendar. I wondered if you’d fill in for me – give it a go? It’s not till Wednesday week,’ she says.

  How could I refuse? If all else fails, what alternative do I have? But first things first. The real world awaits my triumphant return. I hope. I get my best grey suit dry-cleaned and touch up my grey roots ready for Friday’s interview with DGS.

  The 7 a.m. express from Duffy’s Creek station to Central; all around me people are either reading or asleep. I had a wakeful night but am way too hyped to snooze. I re-read the material printed from the DGS web site and watch the paddocks slide past my window, silently psyching myself up to dazzle.

  Even in such a short time the city has changed. It smells different. An unhappy amalgamation of a million infinitesimal odours. The place is frantic. People rush past, their faces tight with worry, mobiles clamped to their ears. A man scurries past carrying a huge stack of legal documents festive with fluttering pink ribbons, his face a study of self-importance. Is that the road map to world peace in his arms? More likely documentation of an ugly divorce – or an ugly bankruptcy. It suddenly all seems so farcical.

  The offices of DGS are quietly swish, not unlike my old offices. Lushly polished antique furniture is juxtaposed with contemporary interior design and bold ‘out there’ colours. We’re creative heavyweights but, hey, we’re funky and upbeat too.

  I am ushered into the boardroom, my coffee is delivered promptly, a mini-plunger on a stainless-steel tray, accoutrements by Alessi – the client treatment. If only they knew it’s this job or scrubbing toilets with Deirdre.

  I meet two of the directors, Warwick and Warren. They seem quite excited, or at least enthusiastic. Hard to know if it’s me, or if they’re just high on life.

  Warwick is about my age, handsome in a corpulent self-satisfied way. He’s the more conservative of the two with his Hong Kong tailoring, initials monogrammed on the breast pocket of his crisp white shirt and a golf-course tan.

  Warren is ten years younger, leggy as a foal and given to running his hands frantically through his hair like a tortured artist. Throughout the meeting he leans forward open-handed, earnest and conspiratorial, then hurls himself back in his chair, ankle across knee, hands laced behind his head, as if he has been to a workshop on how to confuse people with contradictory body language. I perform admirably, I think. Warwick doesn’t mind a little gossip and clearly would like to know more of what went down when I went down. I demonstrate my professional integrity by steering away from that and manage to not even mention Charles. I make them laugh. Tempt them with pithy insights. We part with warm handshakes and assurances. Meaningful eye contact is made and I don’t stutter once.

  I meet Diane for lunch at Café Uno. I’m touched out of all proportion when the staff recognise me and greet me like a long-lost friend; or at least a long-lost customer.

  Diane t
hinks I look well. Relaxed, she says. Just shows how deceiving looks can be. She, on the other hand, is ‘stressed to the max’. She’s under so much pressure at work she feels in desperate need of a holiday. She’s now stressed about whether to have, say, two weeks at the Hyatt Coolum where she could be pampered back to life, or ten days at the ‘adults only’ Club Med in the Maldives from which she would most likely return exhausted but satisfied. Would I like to come? she wonders.

  ‘Is that because you want me to make that onerous decision for you? Diane, I can’t possibly think about a holiday until I get a job. I don’t think you really understand that I am literally broke.’ I stir my coffee aggressively and bang the spoon on the saucer. ‘The joke is this – I thought we were doing fantastically! Charles didn’t do his homework when the company bought those three agencies. He told me he had but he hadn’t. He was conned and when he realised – without even bloody consulting me – he made the decision to trade our way out of trouble and just got us deeper in the shit. Correction: got me deeper in the shit. I was the one who was liable. He didn’t lose his fucking house.’ I can hear how bitter and whingeing I sound.

  ‘Adrienne, you’ve got to move on,’ she says kindly.

  ‘Di, I don’t want to move on, and – for the record – I hate that expression. I want to be severely pissed off until further notice.’

  We sit in an uncompanionable silence for several minutes. I feel no remorse; Diane is the sort of woman who dives into conversations without checking the depth all too often. She’s bound to get hurt.

  ‘So,’ I say, still a little tight-lipped, ‘the upshot is that at the moment I need DGS more than they need me.’

  ‘You’re the media queen, Adrienne,’ Diane says brightly. ‘That’s why DGS want you. Those corporates will flock in when they know you’re enthroned there.’ She orders another latte. ‘I’m thinking of getting some Siamese cats for my new apartment. It looks sensational but it’s very static. I’m keen for you to see it, it’s every shade of crème de cacao.’