“Ha! I win again!”
The cheer from the kitchen interrupted her anxious thoughts. They would get her nowhere; she knew that already. She also needed to concentrate on her letter. She decided to forget about sending individual photos. She’d do what she’d done with her previous letter and attach a family group shot from a few years ago. She hoped no one would notice she, Nick and the girls all looked younger and that Ig appeared to be shrinking rather than growing.
Back at the computer, a chime alerted her to an incoming e-mail. She opened it, secretly glad of another distraction. Thank you, Angela, our Outback Angel!!!! the subject line read. It was from an elderly couple in Chicago, just home after their once-in-a-lifetime trip to Australia, including a week staying on Errigal.
Angela had joined the outback station stay program thirteen years earlier, after the three girls had left home, and before Ig arrived. It had initially been a financial decision. The drought had hit them hard; the wool industry had collapsed. Like all their neighbors, they had needed some extra income. While she’d often helped out with the practical side of station life, Nick had never discussed the station’s finances with her, despite her frequent requests to be involved. Angela had known, though, that every extra dollar would be useful. To her own surprise, she’d discovered she didn’t have a flair for just hosting visitors and tour guiding, but for promotion too. She’d joined forces with local tourism associations, advertising Errigal’s isolation and beauty wherever she could. She’d done the occasional interview on the radio, in newspapers, even once on TV. “The English rose of the Australian outback,” the interviewer had called her.
She’d started small, doing up the old governess’s quarters that adjoined the homestead, welcoming couples and families, one or two a month, from March until November. The numbers had grown as each year passed, expanding to include school groups who were happy to sleep rough in the shearers’ quarters if they weren’t in use by Errigal’s contract shearers. At last count, nearly five hundred people had stayed with them on Errigal, not just from all over Australia but from overseas too—Europe, Asia, America—all seeking a taste of life on an isolated outback station with Angela as their guide.
While Nick had been busy elsewhere on the station, moving stock, maintaining their property, she’d taken her guests on long drives through the empty landscape, pointing out not just Wilpena Pound and Rawnsley Bluff, two landmarks of the Flinders Ranges, but the smaller, less well-known peaks and valleys too. Everything had a name and a story attached. Over the years she had heard them all from Nick, from their Aboriginal stockmen, from their neighbors. She’d loved sharing not only the stories, but all the statistics too. Their property was 170,000 acres, 265 square miles. At its peak, before the drought, it had been home to 10,000 sheep. Huge numbers, but they still took up only a tiny part of this enormous country.
Even after Ig’s surprise arrival, Angela had continued to host visitors, bringing him along in his car seat in the 4WD. She’d taken her guests to all the best lookout spots, enjoying their delight in photographing not just the vast, empty scenery around them, but also the kangaroos, emus and lizards. They were a part of day-to-day life for her now, but still a wonder to overseas visitors. She’d shared stories of the area’s Aboriginal history, showing her guests rock carvings and explaining stories of the Dreaming, about the Adnyamathanha people who had first lived in this area. She’d talked about the Irish Gillespies who had settled here in the 1880s, taken her guests into the now-disused woolshed, let them feel the wooden rails and floorboards made smooth from years of lanolin-rich fleeces. If it was the right time of the year weather-wise, sometimes they even camped out under the stars. She’d learned all the constellations over the years, the Southern Cross, the Pointers, different stars from the ones she’d known growing up in England.
Reading the comments in the visitors’ books always brought back many memories. “This place is one of the world’s best-kept secrets, please stop advertising!” “A once-in-a-lifetime stay, thank you so, so, so much.” Ig was often mentioned too. “What a cute kid! Come visit us in the US someday, Ig!” He’d featured in many of their guests’ photos over the years as well, she knew, looking the part of the wild outback kid with his mop of hair, his shorts and T-shirts no matter the weather and, more often than not, his bare and dusty feet too.
This couple from Chicago had been among her favorite guests. Everything they’d seen, from the smallest bird to the most vivid red sunset over the nearby Chace Range, had been declared “absolutely one hundred percent awesome.” Their email was as enthusiastic. We miss you, Angela! Chicago is too noisy for us now. We miss Errigal and the bird sounds and that huge, huge sky, and the colors and the quiet and most of all we miss you looking after us, spoiling us every hour of every day! She was tempted to read on, but there wasn’t time now. She had work to do. A letter to write.
It did feel like work for once.
Come on, Angela, she thought. Get started. She moved her chair closer to the computer. Her fingers hesitated over the keys. Just do it, she told herself, feeling a headache start to pulse. Get it written, get it sent out, and then you can go and lie down. Even if only for a few minutes.
She finally started, summoning the usual cheery tone she used for her letters, recalling opening sentences from previous years, hoping no one would notice they’d been recycled.
Yes, it’s Angela back again! Can you believe twelve months have passed since I last wrote to you? Where has the time gone? Everything is great with us, after another action-packed and fun-filled year for all the Gillespies. I hope it’s been a good year for all of you too!
She stopped there and thought back over the past year. She thought of all her Christmas letters over the decades. All those bright, happy letters, putting the best possible spin on their lives, making it sound as though the Gillespies were the luckiest, loveliest, most successful, well-balanced, supportive family in all Australia, and possibly even the world. She had always skipped over any troubles. Avoided mention of any tensions. Edited out any sticky subjects. It had felt like the right thing to do, even if she knew they sometimes sounded too good to be true.
She felt her headache pulse faster and rubbed her temple automatically. It wasn’t just the headaches that had kept striking with regularity lately. At the age of fifty-five, something else had started to happen. She’d talked about it with her neighbor Joan, a former nurse and also a station wife. In her mid-sixties, straight-talking and kind, Joan was her best friend in the area, the one person who had genuinely welcomed her when she arrived, a wide-eyed, secretly homesick English girl. They didn’t often meet in person—they lived nearly seventy kilometers apart—but they spoke on the phone regularly, often daily. Angela had shared her worries with Joan several weeks earlier.
“Is it a secret symptom of life after menopause, one that no one talks about?” she’d asked.
“I’m still not sure what ‘it’ is, exactly. You need to be clearer with me. Have you developed blue spots? A forked tongue?”
Angela tried to summarize it. “It’s like a constant urge to tell the truth.”
“Oh, that!” Joan said, laughing. “That’s just wisdom setting in. You’re losing patience with beating around the bush, you mean? You want to get straight to the point all the time? I always feel like that these days. Go for it, love! Let it rip! Tell the truth! It’s good for you.”
But how could she change overnight? Angela had thought afterward. Not after years of being the person in her family who smoothed things over, kept everyone happy, kept their family show on the road. So she’d still tried to be the good, kind, polite, well-mannered woman she’d been brought up to be. The Angela that Nick had married. The mother her children knew. The welcoming host and tour guide. The neighbor who could be relied on to help out, lend a hand . . .
But the new, peculiar sensation wouldn’t go away. It truly was starting to feel as if there were
another Angela inside her, struggling to get out. As if the headaches were a symptom of it, evidence of the “real” her trying to break through the “polite” her. A growing urge to be different, to go back to being the Angela she was when she first came backpacking to Australia all those years before. Adventurous Angela. Full of hope and anticipation Angela. Not the Angela she had become. Ordinary Angela.
Anxious Angela.
She turned and gazed out of the office window behind her. It was still bright outside, but the shadow cast by the deep veranda allowed her to see her reflection. Her head of black curls was now threaded with silver. Her once-pale skin had seen too much sun since she’d arrived nearly thirty-four—how could it possibly be so many?—years ago. She took off her reading glasses and leaned forward. People used to tell her she had beautiful eyes. Such an unusual blue. Nick had often told her they were the first thing he’d noticed the night they met. But after three decades of squinting into bright sunlight, even they seemed to have faded. She still noticed the strength of the light here. At home in England, the weather had been soft, misty, blurred around the edges. Here, the weather was a wild creature, fierce, untamed, with a mind of its own. Oh, you must love all that sunshine, English school friends had written over the years. Aren’t you the jammy thing! Weren’t you in the right place at the right time when that property heir dropped in for a beer!
She’d told the story so many times, not just to neighbors and friends, but to her station stay visitors too. They always wanted to know how an Englishwoman like her had come to live in the outback. Everyone seemed to love the whole romance of her and Nick’s first meeting, the sheer chance of it. There she was, a twenty-two-year-old English backpacker filling in behind the bar for one night for a friend who’d gotten food poisoning. Nick was twenty-eight, from South Australia, in Sydney for one night to go to a big rugby game. He’d arranged to meet friends, got lost and walked into her pub to ask for directions.
She still remembered her first sight of him. Was it fate or destiny or sheer chance that she had looked up just as he came in the door? She’d been reading Wuthering Heights at the time, her head full of thoughts of Heathcliff. It was as if an Australian version had walked in. It wasn’t his looks or his height. He wasn’t conventionally handsome. It was the energy coming off him. A vitality. She’d have guessed even before he told her that his job was a physical, outdoors one. It wasn’t just his tan. He looked fit, strong too. His hair was as dark as hers, his eyes a deep brown. Irish coloring, she’d learned later. She’d helped him with the directions, even drawing a rough map on a beer coaster. On impulse, she offered him a drink on the house. He accepted, but only if he could buy her one at the same time. She was due a break. Over their drinks, they talked. And talked. And laughed. He noticed the time first. He had to go or he’d miss the match. They arranged to meet for a drink after it.
They spent more hours together that night, more talking, more laughing, the physical attraction growing between them by the minute. He wasn’t like any man she’d met before, in England or Australia. He was curious. Thoughtful. Clever, but he wore it lightly. If his eyes were a window to the soul, she could tell he was kind, intelligent, amused, admiring. He walked her back to her hostel. She added good manners to his list of qualities. They didn’t kiss that night. They met for lunch at his hotel the next day, kissed as they were saying good-bye and were still kissing twenty minutes later. She flew to South Australia a week later to see him again. That was when she learned he wasn’t just a farmer but heir to an enormous property on the edge of the outback. “Oh, it’s so romantic!” her friends said. “He’s like an Australian Mr. Darcy!”
They were married within a year. She was pregnant three months later. The twins arrived a week before their first anniversary.
“A marriage written in the stars,” her father said in his effusive speech after their wedding in the cathedral in Adelaide. It was a Gillespie family tradition to be married there, even though Angela had secretly hoped they might get married in the tiny chapel on the Errigal property. But how would everyone fit? Nick had said, smiling. After a moment she’d smiled back. She’d been joking, she said. But she hadn’t. She’d loved that tiny chapel from the first time she saw it. She wasn’t very religious; that wasn’t what appealed to her. She’d loved it as a beautiful building filled with history. The old golden stone, the hand-carved wood, the pews polished to a high gleam by all the farmers and their families who had traveled miles over the years to meet there and pray . . .
It wasn’t a chapel anymore. It had long been deconsecrated. Fifteen years earlier, an electrical storm blew off a section of its roof and knocked out a side wall. It was now little more than a ruin. Even so, she liked to walk across the paddocks to it as often as she could, even for just a few minutes of peace and quiet. She’d sit on one of the remaining pews, look up at the open sky and simply listen. She’d hear the wind slinking through the leaves of the gum trees. The galahs with their squawks, like scratches down a blackboard, a sound to make you wince but one she’d grown to love. If she sat very still, she’d hear more. Lizards skittering across the stone wall beside her. The distant rusty grind of the windmill sails. Sometimes, rarely, the sound of a car on the dirt road, tires on loose gravel. Eventually, as she became stiller, she would hear her own breathing, slow breaths in, slow breaths out . . .
Then always, before too long, a voice. Or two voices. Calling for her across the paddocks. “Mum?” “Mum?” She’d wait for the second call, able to tell even from this distance whether it was urgent or not, whether she could walk back slowly across the scratchy soil, or whether she should run. Only twice had she needed to run, both in recent years, to rescue Ig from physical predicaments. He’d gotten his head trapped in the rungs of a kitchen chair one day. Another time, he was up on top of the pantry cupboard and couldn’t get down. It had been so different raising a boy. Her three daughters had never gotten themselves into so many physical scrapes, had they? If they had, she’d conveniently forgotten them. But having a son—her intense love for Ig—had taken her by surprise in so many ways. What was that joke? “If your mother tells you that she doesn’t have a favorite child, then you’re not her favorite child.” That didn’t apply to Angela, though. She didn’t have any favorites. She loved her four children equally. Of course she did.
She stood and walked over to the window. She couldn’t see much from this side of the homestead, but she knew what was out there. The lawn they tried valiantly to keep green for at least a month or two each year, using water that was always so precious. The old stone toolshed with the blue wooden door that now housed her secondhand pottery wheel and drying kiln. She’d taken up pottery as a hobby in recent months, for reasons she still didn’t quite understand herself. Beside it, the rosebush that Nick had planted for her as a surprise first anniversary present, which still miraculously produced bright red blooms, despite the droughts and heat waves it had endured. All the other station buildings, the woolshed, the shearers’ quarters, the machinery shed. Beyond the station itself, the vast paddocks that one day soon would sprout mining equipment, exploration vehicles . . .
Farther away again, kilometer after kilometer of long, straight dirt roads, with the curving hills of the Chace Range visible on one side, views across to the Flinders Ranges and the distinctive crater shape of Wilpena Pound on the other. Then tarred main roads, then wide highways leading to small towns and to a city, eventually. But overwhelmingly, all around their old stone homestead, there was nothing but wide-open space, for as far as—
“Don’t be mean!”
The voice—Ig’s—made her jump. The game of Scrabble was obviously over. An argument had begun. What was the trigger this time, Angela wondered. Lindy teasing him about his long hair, perhaps? Angela wished she wouldn’t do that. At twenty-nine, she really was old enough to know better. Or was it about whose turn it was to set the table? Even at the age of ten, Ig spent more time arguing about children
’s rights than it would take him to do the task in question. Lindy seemed to have decided she was a guest here, not a family member with housekeeping obligations. In less than a fortnight, the twins would be back home too, arriving with their jumble of suitcases, their constant chatter, taking over the house with their two big personalities. They were powerful enough apart, unstoppable together. Genevieve had put it into words once, at just the age of five. “You can never win, Mum. It’s two of us against one of you.”
Not only them. Nick’s aunt Celia would be here soon as well, trailing a cloud of too-strong musky perfume, her sharp eyes noting every fault in Angela’s housekeeping, her over-cultivated voice airing her ever-ready opinions about the children.
And Nick? Once, they would have laughed about it all together. She’d have had his support, his listening ear. It would have been the two of them united, his wit and humor helping her cope with anything life threw at her. But now?
Her head started to throb again, just above her left ear. The headaches had started five months ago. She’d waged a quiet war against them since then. Her doctor in Port Augusta had sent her for different tests, even a brain scan. She’d been given the all clear, but the headaches had continued. Since then, she’d tried medication, massage, acupuncture, to no avail. She’d talk to her doctor about it again in the new year. There was too much else happening now. Not just the twins coming home, Aunt Celia’s arrival, Christmas to organize. The Gillespies were also this year’s hosts of the mid-December woolshed party. The station families took turns hosting an annual gathering, and it was the Gillespies’ turn again. Angela had been planning it for weeks. Their freezer was already full of party food, and there was a delivery due the next day of all the rented tables, chairs, glasses and crockery.
Odd One Out Page 12
