Simmering Season
Page 44
Paige used several serviettes to scrape the regurgitated baby goop from the collar of her shirt and with a subtle breath in through her nose hoped for a miracle. Nothing. She couldn’t smell a thing: not the freshly ground coffee beans as the barista’s grinder muted the café’s conversation, not the next table’s French toast stacked high with grilled banana and bacon, lashings of maple syrup spilling sensually onto the plate, not the exhaust from the car idling at the kerb, the driver oblivious to the exaggerated coughs and splutters of sidewalk diners. Sometimes, if she tried really hard, Paige’s brain could conjure up the memory of Matilda’s baby smells, but even that was becoming a test for her imagination.
‘You seem distracted,’ Alice said from the passenger seat, jerking Paige back to the task at hand—delivering three weary road-trippers safely to the quaint-sounding boatshed she’d found on the Internet. ‘You sure I can’t drive for a bit? I’m afraid I’m not very good with these map gadgets.’ The annoying navigation voice on the GPS had long since given up trying to tell Alice where to go.
‘I don’t need a break. You relax. It can’t be too much further.’ Paige tried sounding optimistic, but she was distracted by a thought. That crazy day in the mall last December, amid the pre-Christmas shopping madness, should have been the end of weird for Paige. Instead, weird had grabbed hold, bringing the entire Turner household down with a mysterious bug.
The That’s weird bug.
‘That’s weird,’ Matilda had said a couple of days after the Mall Man incident and mid-way through a mouthful of toast and Vegemite, her favourite breakfast.
‘What’s weird, Mati?’ Paige had asked.
‘Nothing.’
Paige remembered shaking her head at the single word that had become the answer to every enquiry:
What did you do at school today?
Nothing.
What have you got for homework?
Nothing.
What do you want for dinner?
Nothing.
‘So, what do you want to do today?’ Paige asked that morning, ever hopeful.
‘Nana Alice is helping me make coconut ice.’
‘For the end-of-year fete at school? I thought I was helping you.’
‘Nana Alice said you needed to rest and I was to leave you alone.’
‘She did, did she?’ Paige smiled at how adult her daughter sounded whenever she repeated one of Nana Alice’s commandments, which depending on the nature of the diktat annoyed Paige a lot or a little. Still, such niggles seemed insignificant, outweighed by the positives of having Alice so readily at hand, especially these last couple of years; the joy of suburban cul-de-sac living, with only the purpose-built gate in the back fence separating Alice’s house from theirs—although according to Robert, some days not separate enough. ‘Well, you’d best save me some of that coconut ice. I’ll pop over in a few hours for a taste test.’
Mati’s scrunched-up nose and sideways glance mirrored her father’s perpetual smirk, as did her bluntness. ‘You’ll say it’s nice, Mummy. You always say everything’s nice.’ She charged off, running straight into her father’s legs.
‘Whoa, watch where you’re going, gorgeous girl.’ Paige’s husband dashed into the kitchen, dancing around his daughter to avoid Vegemite fingerprints on his new Greg Norman golf pants.
Dashing seemed to be something Robert did a lot of these days. Dashing was also the best way to describe her husband: tall, lean and fitter now than he was in his youth, with wild blond locks he insisted on cultivating, obviously in case cute surfer guy ever became au courant in the bush suburbs. His best features by far were his staggering blue eyes and dark lashes to die for—lashes Paige could picture to this day weighed down with an ocean of sun-dried salt water and glistening in the sun. Years before settling into corporate life, Robert had bummed around on Manly beach getting tanned and buff, surfboard dug into the sand, those impenetrable blond locks repelling water droplets, but not girls. At least Paige thought her husband’s eyes were blue. It had been a long time since she’d seen them.
Twenty years they’d been married. Twenty years that had started with his declaration of forever love one New Year’s Eve and marriage six months later. Forty-five-year-old Robert Turner rarely hit the beach these days, but he was probably still impenetrable to water. He was impenetrable to just about everything else—including his wife.
Paige loaded fresh beans into the in-built espresso machine—the two-thousand dollar one requiring little human intervention, no bean tamping skills, no milk texturing expertise. The over-sized monstrosity had been included with the kitchen renovations she didn’t agree they needed. The sound of coffee beans whizzing around the grinder transported her back to the episode with the sad man outside Gloria Jean’s at the mall. She wondered why she hadn’t found an opportunity to mention the incident to Robert while they routinely brushed their teeth at the his-and-hers bathroom sinks before climbing into bed each night. One night she’d tried, but by the time her husband had finished shaving—shaving at night meant he’d have that perfect, consistently sexy stubble the next day—Paige was already tucked in on her side and lost in the Lisa Heidke novel, Claudia’s Big Break, wishing she could have a big break away of her own. She’d waited until her husband settled against three fluffed-up, feather-filled pillows to read the business section from the morning paper—again—and without rolling over said, ‘Robert . . . ?’
‘Hmm? Sorry, hon, did you say something?’
‘Nothing,’ Paige mumbled into her pillow, marvelling at how much like a sulky six-year-old she suddenly sounded.
Alice looked up from her Sudoku magazine. She started to say something about the roadside flood indicators and Paige pulled her thoughts back to concentrate on the car descending into a small gully with a long, narrow bridge at the bottom. The warped and wiggling boards challenged the Audi’s suspension, the resulting rumble a lot like thunder, startling a noise out of a sleepy Matilda in the back seat. Paige activated the wipers, and with several blasts of water from the jets managed to wash away the dusty film. Last night’s summer rainstorm had been fierce, whipping the bedroom windows and waking Paige in a lather of sweat at 2 am.
Was it the thundering rain?
More likely another nightmare, she thought.
Feeling the familiar sensation of tears forming, Paige turned her face slightly, away from Alice’s scrutiny. Two years had not lessened the devastating loss of her second-born. Telling Robert about her thoughts and the reccurring nightmares no longer helped. According to him, if Paige fell apart she wasn’t coping, and if she kept a tight lid on her emotions she wasn’t coping either; hence the brave face she mastered in company. It stood to reason, once sleep came, all that holding back would be let go, manifesting as thrashing and whimpering, enough to send Robert into the spare room on too many nights. In the mornings, weary and frustrated, her husband would only half listen as she tried to explain the cryptic images and crying babies that had crowded her head at night. As usual, anything not based on fact had little chance of grabbing her husband’s attention away from the day’s stock report.
With a recent dream more confusing than normal, thanks to a cameo appearance by Mr I-Thought-You-Were-Someone-Else from the mall, she’d ambushed Robert at the breakfast table while waiting for the coffee machine to do its thing. A glance out the window and across the yard confirmed Matilda was already safely ensconced in her Nana Alice’s kitchen. The two of them waved back, their ritual to signal Mati’s safe arrival. Soon enough they’d start whipping up the school fete day fare and the thought of coconut snow floating down to rest on Alice’s spotless linoleum floor made Paige smile as she turned to face her husband.
‘Robert, I need to talk to you about something.’
‘What’s that, Paige?’ he asked with a flick of his wrist, his face peering around the edge of the newspaper to check the time on his watch.
She was partway through explaining her interpretation of the dream, and hadn’t even
got to Mall Man, when Robert interrupted.
‘So, you’re Australia’s own psychic medium extraordinaire, like the one off that American TV show you watch. A down under Alison Whatshername? I suppose that makes me the flaky, soppy guy who plays the husband, moping around trying to be useful. Next you’re going to tell me Mati’s levitating in her bed at night and seeing dead people. Wooooo, spookeee!’ Robert laughed at his own ridiculous sound effects. ‘Like I’ve said before, Paige, you watch too much television. You need an interest.’
‘I have a job.’
The espresso machine beeped and gurgled.
‘You need something that gets you out of the house.’
Paige couldn’t see his face behind the newspaper so she didn’t know if he was smiling or not. At least he’d heard her. As she removed the tiny espresso cup, the coffee machine beeped, whirred and then robotically spoke the word, ‘En-joy.’
‘I’m trying to talk to you about something that’s troubling me.’
‘If either of you start predicting the stock market, you will give me the heads up, won’t you?’
‘Sometimes, Robert, you can be a real . . .’
‘In fact,’ he continued as if having the conversation all on his own, ‘rather than sit around all day watching TV, if you wanted something to do you could—’
‘I don’t sit around all day, Robert. And stop telling me I watch too much TV.’
‘All I’m saying is Mati’s last newsletter had another call for tuckshop parents. You love food. Why not volunteer a couple of days? They’d be lucky to have someone with your food background.’
‘And feed salmonella sandwiches to the students with off chicken and rancid milk I can’t smell? I don’t believe you’re even making the suggestion. And you know what else?’ Paige drew a deep breath to prepare for her rant and delivered the espresso to the corner dining nook, slamming the coffee cup down hard enough to send a crema geyser into the air.
‘Watch it, Paige!’ Robert brushed his trousers, barely looking away from his paper, but shifting slightly in case any liquid dare spill over the table edge.
‘Newsflash, Robert, you can’t possibly be that Joe character on TV. Soppy or not, at least he knows how to be a husband. He understands his wife, and when he doesn’t he still tries to be supportive and open to the possibility that he doesn’t know everything there is to bloody know.’ Paige punched the centre of the newspaper so hard one edge tore away from his hand.
‘Come on, hon, you’re being ridiculous. I’m joking. Besides it’s make believe. They’re actors on TV.’
‘Then why does their marriage seem more real to me than ours? I wish I was Alison Dubois with a wonderful husband. Instead, I married a bloody newspaper.’ She stormed out of the kitchen and back up to bed, throwing herself down hard, surprised by her own hysterics.
Probably hormones, she thought through tears. At least that’s what Robert would mutter to himself as he picked up his briefcase from the downstairs office, draped his suit coat over one arm and clamped the car keys to the black BMW between his teeth to open the front door. Somewhere about that time he’d think to walk back and kiss his wife’s cheek—keys and all. Only today was Saturday, so instead of a briefcase, it would be a golf bag from the cupboard under the stairs.
‘Paige, honey, I’m sorry. Are you all right? I’ll come straight back after the game and we can talk. Okay? I love you.’ His voice travelled up the stairs, the last three words landing softly on her ears.
She could get up, go downstairs, see her husband off. Rob tried. He worked eighty hours a week, missing out on spending quality time with his daughter. He provided for his family every way he knew how—except emotionally, when Paige needed him the most. But as the front door slammed shut she squeezed her eyes tight and willed sleep to take her away in the knowledge she’d have a couple of hours before needing to be at Alice’s for the promised coconut ice taste-test.
When sleep didn’t come, Paige reverted to her usual habit of counting sheep to a make-believe metronome, which routinely and bizarrely resulted in a Waltzing Matilda earworm—the bit about the jumbucks and the shade of a Coolabah tree.
Then sleep. But not before making a decision.
Getting away for a while with Mati, before she started the new school year, had been a good decision.
A good decision at the time, Paige mused as she steered down another steep hillside to Mati’s complaints from the back seat that she was bored and her ears had popped. They’d left the hairpin bends and high altitude behind and after a final sweeping curve, bordered by a botanical wonderland, the car emerged from the heavily wooded, mountainous descent they’d been travelling for some time. Spreading out before them was a landscape of rolling green hills that in the golden glow of a setting sun were the colour of ripe limes. This was the change of scene she had been hoping for, although with no sign of drought, it was far from the type of countryside Paige had expected from her Internet searches and she could only think . . .
Well, that’s definitely weird!
Jenn J McLeod ~ Come home to the country …
to small towns keeping big secrets
When Jenn J McLeod quit Sydney’s corporate communications chaos, she bought a little café in a small town and ran a unique, dog-friendly B&B in country New South Wales. Home is now a fifth wheeler caravan, and her days are spent writing heart-warming tales of Australian country life that weave intricate tapestries of friendship, family, love and contemporary issues.
Readers and reviewers alike enthusiastically received Jenn’s debut, House for all Seasons, placing it at Number 5 on the 2013 Nielsen’s Best Selling Debut Novel list. Simmering Season is the second book in her Seasons Quartet, followed by her third novel, Season of Shadow and Light, with the fourth Seasons novel to be published in 2016.
Visit Jenn at her website at www.jennjmcleod.com
on Twitter @jennjmcleod
and at her author Facebook page, Jenn J McLeod.Books
Author photograph by Marie Miller
Also by Jenn J McLeod
House for all Seasons
Season of Shadow and Light
SIMMERING SEASON
First published in Australia in 2014 by
Simon & Schuster (Australia) Pty Limited
Suite 19A, Level 1, 450 Miller Street, Cammeray, NSW 2062
This edition published in 2015
www.SimonandSchuster.com
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© Jenn J McLeod 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: McLeod, Jenn J., author.
Title: Simmering season/Jenn J. McLeod.
ISBN: 9781922052094 (paperback)
9781922052087 (ebook)
Subjects: Class reunions – Fiction.
Dewey Number: A823.4
Cover design: Christabella Designs
Cover image: Esmahan Ozkar/Trevillion Images
Internal design and typesetting by Midland Typesetters, Australia