Simmering Season

by Jenn J. McLeod

  Are you feeling confused or worried about any of the subjects covered in this book? I know that one person’s fiction can be another person’s reality. If you, or someone you know, would benefit from information or from talking to someone about sexuality or mental health issues, there is loads of information online. Here are just a few useful links:

  Australia

  Lifeline: 13 11 14, www.lifeline.org.au

  Beyond Blue: 1300 224636, www.beyondblue.org.au

  Kids Help Line: 1800 551800—free, confidential, phone and online counselling for people aged between 5 and 25, www.kidshelp.com.au

  PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays): a non-profit voluntary organisation information and support to families, friends of all gay people: www.pflagaustralia.org.au

  New Zealand

  www.lifeline.co.nz

  www.youthline.co.nz

  www.rainbowyouth.org.nz

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  Reading groups can use these book club discussion questions to explore Simmering Season’s various themes.

  1. Several themes simmer away in this story. Is there one that stands out for you?

  2. How do you feel about school reunions? Do you agree with Maggie’s assertion that they apply pressure to show off achievements?

  3. The fictional i-ICON reality TV concept has Brian addicted to the promise of fame. Discuss the negative effects of reality TV, especially talent shows that might ridicule and harm those more impressionable members of our community.

  4. When we meet Fiona she is spoilt, immature, hurting and resentful. What do you see as her turning point in the story?

  5. Did Fiona mean to betray Noah? What were the influencing factors?

  6. Maggie wants to support her son’s choices and help him, but she wonders how she can protect him from something that she doesn’t fully understand herself. Discuss how you might approach a similar situation, or what advice you might give to a friend in Maggie’s position.

  7. Brian’s ranking on the character likeability scale is, well, not high! At what stage in the story (if any) did you feel empathy for the situation in which he finds himself?

  8. As a fictional crash investigator, Dan has strong views about the contributing factors behind crashes (vehicle, environment, human). Discuss each factor and apply the sort of inappropriate choices we might make as a road user (car, pedestrian, rider) that might contribute to crashes.

  9. By the end of the novel, which character has grown the most?

  10. Was the ending satisfying? If not, what would you have done differently?

  Additional questions for readers of House for all Seasons, by Jenn J McLeod.

  A. Chapter one – the funeral. How did you feel when you read the name of the person who died?

  B. Simmering Season offers glimpses of Amber’s life, as seen through Fiona’s eyes. Having witnessed Amber’s growth in House for all Seasons, are you satisfied/happy with the author’s portrayal of her character post the Dandelion House?

  We hope you’ve found these discussion points useful. If you or your book club have a burning question you’d like the author to answer, please let her know. Jenn loves talking about her stories with readers!

  Connect with Jenn on her website (www.jennjmcleod.com), on Facebook, and on Twitter.

  LOOKING FOR ANOTHER GREAT READ?

  If you enjoyed Simmering Season and House for all Seasons, you’ll love Jenn J McLeod’s new book, Season of Shadow and Light, coming to a bookstore near you in 2015.

  Read on for an exclusive peek at the first two chapters.

  Some time this season …

  The secret keeper must tell.

  The betrayed must trust.

  The hurt must heal.

  When it seems that everything Paige trusts is beginning to betray her, she leaves her husband at home and sets off on a road trip with her six-year-old daughter, Matilda, and Nana Alice in tow.

  But stranded amid rising floodwaters on a detour to the tiny town of Coolabah Tree Gully, Paige discovers the greatest betrayal of all happened there twenty years earlier.

  Someone knows that truth can wash away the darkest shadows, but …

  are some secrets best kept for the sake of others?

  A story of secrets and love, of family loyalty, and of trust – the kind that takes years to build, but only seconds to wash away.

  SEASON OF SHADOW AND LIGHT

  Never fear shadows.

  They simply mean there’s a light shining somewhere nearby.

  Ruth Renkel

  PROLOGUE

  Same dream, same time, same sweaty body reduced to a shivering mess. Paige peeled her knees from her chest, unfurling her body from its foetal position, cramped fingers slowly relinquishing the fisted balls of bed sheet to fumble in the dark for the mobile phone with its illuminated display. Not that she needed to check a clock to know the time, not after all these years.

  Her first thought this morning was to poke Robert from his silent slumber. Once upon a time, her husband would have felt her stir and woken, rolled over, held her, whispered his love for her and massaged that knotted muscle at the base of her neck. Then, without the need for words, her dutiful knight would have clambered out of bed and made a point of examining every nook and cranny of the house so that Paige could confidently close her eyes again. Over time, however, the armour had tarnished, the fairy tale had faded, the knight had tired, his investigations become less forensic, until so cursory Paige no longer bothered waking him at all. Not because he wouldn’t check, put his wife’s mind at ease, let her fall back to sleep; their relationship had not deteriorated to that level. Not waking Robert was more about Paige wanting to avoid his predictable jibes over breakfast the next morning about what he labelled her overactive imagination.

  Paige slipped out of bed and with the phone lighting her way tiptoed to Matilda’s room. Not until she could peer through the gap in the doorway to see the Disney nightlight casting its dancing shadows across the small, sleeping form would Paige think to breathe, convinced—again—that no one had slipped from those shadows and stolen her daughter away in the night. As usual there was no one in the house, no one smashing windows, no one ripping her baby from her arms. It was as the doctors and therapists suggested. First her body had betrayed her; now her mind was playing tricks.

  Paige fell back against the wall, sliding to the floor outside Matilda’s room. Clasping bent knees with one arm, the thumb of her other hand punched out a phone number. And only then did she glance at the time—always 2 am—before whispering . . .

  ‘Alice? Same dream.’

  1

  Paige

  ‘Where are we?’ Matilda asked from her booster in the back seat. ‘Are we lost, Mummy?’

  Paige glanced at her daughter in the rear-view mirror, and with the lie like a sour lolly she couldn’t hold in, said, ‘Of course we’re not lost. The trip is taking a little longer than I expected.’

  Why with every iPhone app at her fingertips had Paige not thought to check the driving conditions before leaving the house? On the road since dawn, the trio had hit one delay after another. An earlier overturned semi-trailer on the motorway north of Gosford, its payload of packaged peanuts strewn across all northbound lanes, had them well behind schedule and suffering the mid-summer temperatures, with only occasional blasts of air-con to save fuel. Not even Paige’s impromptu stand-up routine, telling the family’s favourite peanut jokes, had lifted her travel companions’ spirits at the time.

  Perhaps she could have checked the weather, too. According to the radio’s weatherman just now, the week would bring ‘perfect blue and cloudless skies to northeast NSW’.

  Perfect for lying on a beach somewhere and sipping cocktails maybe?

  If Paige had listened to Alice—the woman refusing to look anywhere but out the car’s side passenger window, sighing with exasperation for the tenth time in as many minutes—they might well be looking forward to spending the rest of January in the coo
l comfort of a beach resort. Instead, at the height of summer, Paige was headed for a hot, dusty country town to constant cries from the backseat of: ‘Are we there yet, Mummy?’

  Maybe they could have taken the inland highway, Paige added to her musings and the mental list of what ifs forming as mid-afternoon passed and dark, grey clouds thickened overhead, hanging what seemed mere metres from the roof of Paige’s Audi station wagon. In fact, she could have sworn one cloud had trailed them all the way from the highway turnoff two hours ago.

  Now rain.

  Perfect! Not the weather, but the perfect time to stop, to clean the windscreen, to refuel—the car, the crabby companion, the kid—and hopefully make their destination before sundown. Maybe she should have thought about doing all those things at the last roadhouse, as such establishments had been sparse since. They’d driven past a couple of side roads with signs showing the little petrol bowser icon, although the last arrow had been bent perpendicular so that it pointed to the sky. The Audi fuel gauge was showing a quarter full and the fancy trip calculator told her she was good for another 150 kilometres. Paige wasn’t convinced though, and with such mountainous terrain so far from typical highway driving conditions, they’d been going through fuel fast.

  The steep road had narrowed ten minutes ago, her daughter blissfully quiet for a change, engrossed in the Disney DVD of the moment; one of three Santa presents left in her stocking. Paige tried tuning out the occasional I-told-you-so stare from the adjacent passenger seat; a look she undoubtedly deserved as her doggedness was what had got them all to this point.

  Lost!

  Of course, she could shift the blame for their current predicament to Robert. The state of her marriage did seem to be trending—had been for some time. Only the word trending implied the subject was being discussed. She and Robert didn’t talk so much of late about anything other than his work that kept him out late, or his sport that kept him away all weekend. As a result, Paige hadn’t even mentioned the man at the shopping mall six weeks ago, the unmistakable desperation in the stranger’s embrace pressed into Paige’s memory, as well as the heart-rending, rueful expression once he’d realised his mistake.

  ‘I’d call you by your name, but I don’t know what it is,’ the man had said, handing Paige a business card. ‘Please, take this. Maybe I can buy you a coffee one day to apologise and explain.’

  With a trace of guilt, as if someone was handing her a note in class with the answers to the test, Paige had offered a cursory glance before banishing the card to the abyss of her shoulder bag.

  ‘You’ve apologised enough,’ she said, her voice tinged with equal parts sympathy and suspicion. ‘Let’s not make this any weirder than it is already, okay?’

  His big, broad smile seemed genuinely curious. ‘I’m not sure I know what you mean?’

  ‘Business cards? Coffee? Trying to be friends?’ she explained. ‘We’re not. We’re strangers. Strangers who happened to . . . Never mind.’

  The incident, blown out of proportion by an overly officious security guard with latent local hero aspirations, had already taken up thirty precious minutes. Mati would be waiting outside the school and Paige couldn’t be late. Only yesterday she’d endured one of Alice’s ‘What’s the world coming to?’ sermons, then an Alice lecture about stranger danger and after-school safety.

  ‘Wait!’ The stranger in the mall had called to her as she left the Centre Management offices. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’

  Paige cast a curt glance over one shoulder as she limped away. ‘That you thought I was your long lost love? In a word, no.’

  Chance meetings? Long lost loves? They only happened in movies and books. Real life for Paige Turner was anything but thrilling, despite the facade of a busy social calendar and a privileged life in Sydney with her high-flyer husband and Matilda, their six-year-old daughter. But the incident that December day—a coffee at Gloria Jeans, a busy shopping mall, and an intensely remorseful man overwhelmed by the tragedy of unrequited love—had brought Paige’s own discontent into the light.

  Perhaps not telling Robert about that incident straightaway had added to the mystery and excitement of having an exotic stranger embrace her enthusiastically, even if it was in the middle of a shopping mall. Had the encounter taken place anywhere else, without Paige hitting the deck when her dodgy leg gave way, and without the over-zealous security guard witnessing the incident, she was sure they’d have sorted the matter of mistaken identity quickly and without fuss. But the heart-attack-waiting-to-happen guard with the halitosis and sweat-stained shirt, whose highly visible presence was probably meant to reassure shoppers following a recent south Sydney shopping mall shooting, said he had—quote—‘witnessed the suspicious behaviour’, reporting it as such to Centre Management.

  A few days later, after school the drop-off and yet to tell her husband, Paige had the urge to tell Jane Lowy, mother of six-year-old Samuel whose name was popping up in her daughter’s distinctive scribble on various schoolbooks.

  Paige caught up with her as she waited on the side of the road with the safety supervisor. ‘Time for a coffee this morning?’ she asked as Jane paused briefly in the middle of the road to bend the flexible arm of the pram’s sunshade, much to the disapproval of the school crossing attendant. Although barely summer, with the school bell yet to ring for the start of class, the December sun bore down with sinister intensity.

  ‘Always time for coffee.’

  ‘Sure is steamy after last night’s rain,’ Paige said, happy to discuss the weather until the pair was settled at an inside table directly under one of two overhead ceiling fans.

  Jane coochee-cooed the baby, removed the pink dummy, and shoved a bottle between its rosebud lips before exhaling loudly, as if dropping her small son off at school and pacifying a happy baby was an exhausting chore. For a fleeting moment the thought gave Paige an ache in her heart where there should have been joy—if only . . .

  After ordering their drinks, Paige launched into her story. ‘The weirdest thing happened at the mall . . .’

  Wide-eyed for the entire account, Jane eventually giggled. ‘Oh, he sounds very mysterious. Why don’t exciting things happen to me? Gosh, I’d be going back there every day. A kind of Brief Encounter, only without the train.’

  More like Scenes from a Mall, only not so Woody Allen, Paige was tempted to say, but comparing her home life to a Hollywood rom-com about infidelity would be letting out too much information about the state of her marriage; Jane wasn’t that good a friend. Instead, she asked to burp the baby and Jane—somewhat reluctantly in Paige’s estimation—handed over the small, tightly wrapped bundle. Again, she and Jane weren’t exactly friends.

  Genuine friendship had evaded Paige, and any professional relationships she’d once enjoyed at work fizzled out when she’d relocated the family, the distance leaving most friends unable, or perhaps unwilling, to overcome the seemingly insurmountable divide between the trendy inner city and the outer-Sydney suburbs. Home for the Turners in the city’s northern gateway of Berowra could hardly be more outer-Sydney. Paige had been the one to insist they find a nice, leafy area. Somewhere safe. Somewhere that would allow Mati space and independence, while allowing an over-protective Paige to let go a little. As tempted as she was, and despite the recurring nightmares, Paige refused to become one of those mothers who clung so tight that something as simple as an acquaintance burping a baby was viewed with caution.

  Sometimes she tried to tell Robert how the bad dreams made her feel—like someone was tearing her baby from her arms and as hard as she might try to hold on she’d lose her grip and the baby would disappear into the darkness.

  ‘More like losing your grip on reality,’ Robert would tell her. ‘They’re dreams, Paige. The doctors said they’ll go away. I appreciate it must be hard. Losing a baby like we did is hard on me too, you know, but life goes on, hon. You have to try harder. Time to let go.’

  The problem was, Paige didn’t want to let go. As terrifying
as the nightmares were, for a brief moment each time, they let her experience the joy of holding the baby she’d lost.

  Now she was stuck in a kind of limbo, no longer good enough for the job she’d loved—Food Editor with Going Gourmet Magazine—and no good at the dutiful wife and stay-at-home-mum thing. There was her poorly paid, part-time distraction with a national food company, although she couldn’t call blogging about processed food a real job. At least the weekly deadline stopped her going mad, even though working from home was much the same as being invisible. The once outgoing and unstoppable city executive was living in her husband’s shadow and blaming him for her lot in life.

  If Paige was honest with herself about her so-called brief encounter at the mall, she would admit that the notion of a sensitive stranger accosting her had added a thrill she’d missed since her illness. The man who spoke with broken English, his shiny white teeth set against dark skin, had been so sweet, so beguiling, so mysterious, Paige had hardly noticed the pain in her ankle until much later. The sad thing was, her husband hadn’t noticed her exaggerated limp that night at all. Keeping news of the dalliance from Robert had meant enjoying the mischievous feeling for a few days longer, before the monotony and predictability of life for Paige Turner took over again.

  The irony! Why had she not kept the surname Foster when marrying Robert? Life for her these days was so not a page-turner.

  ‘Oh my gosh, Paige, look what my little monster has done.’ Jane ripped three moist towelettes from the bag hanging on the back of the pram before lunging across the café table, sending a rush of panic through Paige.

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Can you not smell that?’ Jane asked, shoving the towelettes at her before retrieving the baby and settling her back in the pram. ‘Sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing differently with this one but . . . Phew! Samuel’s puke never smelled this bad. I guess it’s this crazy heat. Now there’s something else we can blame on global warming and the government. Smelly puke!’ Jane laughed and resumed her coochee-cooing.