by Helen Brown
One thing was certain. The only thing worse than annihilation would be to continue living like this. Either she jumped or . . . Lisa tossed the ring in the air. It hovered over the city and winked in a shaft of light.
As gravity took hold and sucked the gold circle down to the street, she suddenly knew what she had to do. Lisa Katz was dead and gone. She was changing her name back to Lisa Trumperton. And she was moving home to Australia.
Chapter 4
The first tulips were blooming in their sidewalk tubs by the time Lisa was ready to leave New York. The whole business had turned out to be more draining than she’d imagined. The volunteers at the animal shelter put on a farewell coffee morning, but her closest friends seemed to go out of their way to be difficult.
Over lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central, Vanessa had pretended to understand, but it was obvious she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to travel beyond the US for a holiday. The notion of leaving on a permanent basis was practically treason. She reminded Lisa how much effort she’d put into getting her colleagues to agree to the deadline extension. Vanessa wondered aloud if Lisa shouldn’t stay in New York and finish the book before gallivanting around the globe.
Lisa had taken a gulp of sauvignon blanc and steeled herself to tell Vanessa the truth—that she would need to move to Australia to have any chance of writing the book at all. When Vanessa saw how close Lisa was to breaking down, she softened and confessed that Lisa wasn’t the craziest author she’d had to deal with. There was the guy who insisted on writing books with quill and ink on toilet paper. Nevertheless, after she’d settled the bill and kissed Lisa on the cheek, Vanessa promised to email Lisa her shrink’s details.
Kerry had played the guilt card. Tears blistered in his eyes as he wondered aloud if he’d ever see her again. She assured him she’d be back for visits, and there was always Skype. He claimed his knowledge of technology ended with the fax machine.
Others treated her like the doomed heroine of an Italian opera. She couldn’t escape from them fast enough.
Jake made no attempt to hide his opinion that she was insane going to live with a bunch of kangaroos. Still, he didn’t object when she suggested he move back into their apartment with Belle while the lawyers stepped into the wrestling ring.
Packing up was like deciding who to save from the Titanic. Her wedding present from Aunt Caroline was rescued; the red negligee Jake had given her two Christmases ago was not. As Lisa encased Aunt Caroline’s crockery in bubble wrap she admired the familiar art nouveau pattern of yellow tulips—or were they magnolias? It was typical of her grandfather’s sister to have exquisite taste, even though Lisa suspected the old girl had picked the set up in a secondhand shop. Each cup was rimmed with gold, and the delicate vase shape rested lightly in her hand. The handle was angled in a way that insisted it be held elegantly, the little finger tucked away rather than poking out in a manner Aunt Caroline would have called vulgar. The set had survived this long because it had spent most of the past two decades roosting at the back of the top shelf. Only one cup was missing, along with the lid of the sugar bowl. The milk jug was cracked.
Lisa moved on to her study to shroud the masks and photographs in plastic. A copy of Jane Eyre tumbled off the shelves and landed at her feet. She opened a page at random and read the lines where Jane asks herself what she wants. Her answer? She craves a new home, among new people and in different circumstances. Charlotte Brontë knew how she felt.
Lisa’s hand hovered over the photo of Bon Jovi. Was it madness to send a photo of a cat she’d never owned across the world? His amber eyes flashed a swift reply, and she swaddled him up and added him to the box.
As a pair of removal men carried her possessions away, a strange sensation washed over her. She felt like a caterpillar nudging off the weight of the cocoon it’d been trapped in for years.
By the time she boarded the plane she was numb with exhaustion. At the door, she automatically veered left into business class. But champagne before takeoff was part of her old life. She turned around and fought a tide of Italian suits to the bowels of economy.
The flight was full. Her reward for forgetting to check in online the night before was a centre seat next to the toilets. She squeezed herself between Michelin man and a woman with a toddler straight out of The Exorcist. To divert anxiety, she slid her phone from her pocket and sent a text to Portia.
‘On my way xxx’
No reply. Portia was probably too busy posting food porn on Facebook, perhaps chocolate gateau and red velvet cupcakes that Lisa presumed would never pass her daughter’s lips, if Portia’s shrinking physique was anything to go by.
Lisa had hoped Portia might spend an hour with her during her two-hour stopover in LA. She’d already earmarked the airport café, where she planned to surreptitiously stuff Portia full of carbs. She felt guilty leaving behind a daughter who needed feeding so badly. But what was the point? Portia couldn’t get far enough away from her.
As soon as she landed, her phone buzzed in her handbag. ‘Soooo sorry, mom! Last minute audition. Safe travels. Love u heaps xxxxxooooo’
On the long Pacific leg, Lisa managed to get some sleep. Somewhere over Hawaii, she hallucinated she was wedged in a whalebone corset serving burnt scones to the squire’s wife. She woke with a jolt and decided Three Sisters: Emily was going to be an empowering read. Her fictional Emily was destined to be a rebel, not a victim. Like Cathy in Wuthering Heights, she’d be torn between two men. A local earl and a buffed-up stablehand would both fall desperately in love with her. She’d wander the moors and launch into physical relationships with them both.
Climbing over the snoring mountain beside her, she fumbled in the overhead locker for her handbag. For once it contained a notebook and a pen. She scribbled in it over the rest of the Pacific Ocean and then the giant dry biscuit of Australia.
When the pilot announced he was descending into Melbourne, where it was 8.35 a.m., Lisa was semi-delirious. She couldn’t wait to see Ted. Lisa promised herself not to bring up the subject of his new girlfriend too soon. Then her mind turned to Portia. Had the child eaten anything since the plane left LA?
‘Just landed,’ she texted Portia.
‘xxxxxooo’ Portia replied.
Red-eyed, stinking and crazed from twenty-two hours in the air, Lisa staggered into the arrivals hall and scanned the crowd. ‘Ted!’ she cried, hurling herself at her son.
Recoiling slightly, Ted planted a kiss on the hair above her right ear. He was wearing a red check shirt. His beard had filled out but was neatly trimmed and his dark eyes were twinkling.
You look great!’ she said.
He didn’t return the compliment. Her orange pashmina did nothing to conceal the crumples and stains on her charcoal track pants. Flying pyjamas, she liked to think of them.
Ted introduced her to his flatmate, a young man who was standing next to him, a wide smile on his face. Before she’d even said hello the flatmate’s name slipped out of her mind. It was Josh or George or something.
Outside, Lisa blinked into the Melbourne morning. She’d forgotten the harshness of Australian light compared to the lived-in air of New York and her eyes felt like apricot balls rolled in coconut.
‘You’re welcome to stay with us,’ Ted’s flatmate said as he stashed her bags in the back of the Kombi van.
She assured him she’d be fine, thanks.
‘Aunt Maxine’s looking forward to seeing you,’ Ted hollered as they rumbled down the wrong side of roads lined with trees ablaze with colour. New York’s spring was Melbourne’s autumn. It was going to take a while to adjust to being in Australia.
‘Hope you’re right.’
As the van spun along the motorway towards glistening towers, she was struck by the sleek modernity of the city. New York’s old skyscrapers and bridges seemed antique by comparison. Maybe this was the new New World.
The van dived into a tunnel under the river then peeled off the motorway into the tree-lined str
eets of Camberwell. They jolted to a halt outside Maxine’s house, crouched like a cat about to pounce. It hadn’t changed in twenty years. Every clinker brick oozed stability and smugness, by-products of a successful Camberwell marriage.
A large autumn leaf fluttered down the path. As it drew closer Lisa realised it was actually Maxine in an orange poncho.
‘How was the flight?’ her sister asked as Lisa climbed stiffly out of the van.
‘Fine,’ Lisa lied. Australians were immune to distance. They made a point of never complaining, whether they were driving across desert from one side of the country to the other or flying around the world.
Ted and the other boy heaved her bags up the path and deposited them in the hall before scurrying back to the central city.
Chapter 5
‘What do you think?’ Maxine opened the guest room door onto a scene resembling Pirates of the Caribbean. A stuffed seagull glared from the top of a crow’s nest in the corner. Misshapen and cross-eyed, the bird had to be the work of an enthusiastic amateur. Shelves groaned with seashells enhanced with paint and glitter. Three ships were imprisoned in bottles. Maxine had been to night classes again.
‘Fresh,’ Lisa said, smiling at two single beds with duvet covers featuring flurries of semaphore flags.
‘Bit of fun.’ Maxine tossed a red lifebuoy cushion in the air.
Lisa wheeled her suitcase to rest under a tapestry portrait of a sea captain. She couldn’t help smiling. Maxine’s approach to kitsch was in no way ironic. She’d simply inherited their mother’s appalling taste, along with the MacNally button nose. Yet for all their differences Lisa did love her sister.
‘Come through to the family room,’ Maxine said. ‘We need to chat.’
Lisa’s surge of fondness waned. Maxine’s chats always involved bossiness. Nevertheless, she obediently followed her sister down the hall and settled warily in an armchair smothered with sunflowers. Red poppies clambered across the wallpaper until they ran out of space and fought for survival against giant hydrangeas on the curtains. French provincial, apparently.
‘I’m so pleased you’ve come home for a little holiday,’ Maxine said, flourishing a tray laden with her signature white chocolate and raspberry muffins. ‘After all you’ve been through.’
‘It’s not a holiday.’
‘Oh, you’ll change your mind in a week or two,’ Maxine said, pouring tea into identical Portmeirion cups. Lisa marvelled at her sister’s ability to produce matching crockery. Maxine, on the other hand, was so bemused by Lisa’s love of ethnic masks and brightly woven fabrics she actually gave her a subscription to Home Beautiful one birthday. Lisa tried not to take it personally. If her sister had travelled more widely, read more books and known a few more men when she was younger, she’d understand taste when she saw it.
‘I’m back for good,’ Lisa said, reaching for a muffin and crumbling it on her plate to make it seem less fattening.
Maxine stirred her brew thoughtfully. ‘The thing is you can’t come back,’ she said in her primary school teacher voice. ‘The Australia we grew up in doesn’t exist. It’s not all lamingtons and Hills hoist clotheslines any more. You’ve changed since you moved to the States. Things here have changed, too.’
‘I know.’
‘We’re more sophisticated. We have marvellous cafés in Melbourne now, but we’re not all rich and famous like some people.’
Lisa sighed. There was no point telling Maxine her finances were far from buoyant. Jake’s reckless investments had taken a hammering through the double-dip recession. Now, thanks to Cow Belle, what was left was about to be halved. She had a modest nest egg, but Lisa needed to churn out at least one bestseller a year for the foreseeable future. And while Three Sisters had a Facebook fan page, she was hardly a celebrity.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll find a place of my own in a week or two.’
‘That’s not my point,’ Maxine said, waving her hand to display the coloured flecks in her nail polish. ‘You can stay here as long as you like. Gordon won’t mind.’
It hadn’t occurred to Lisa that Gordon would object to anything that had Maxine’s seal of approval.
‘The thing is, at our age . . .’
Lisa settled back in her chair and let the lecture wash over her. The whole house was a shrine to Maxine-ness. A photo of Maxine as a prefect at Methodist Ladies College took pride of place on the dresser. Everyone in the family had been thrilled when Maxine won a scholarship to such a posh school, largely due to her expertise with a hockey stick. Ruby was always encouraging Maxine to bring friends home, but the doctors’ and lawyers’ daughters avoided the shabby Trumperton house for more genteel company. The school directed Maxine’s pent-up aggression at the netball court. Her Goal Attack terrified teams from public and private schools alike. In her final year she was made captain of the senior team.
Next to the prefect photo was an image of Maxine smiling coyly from under a bridal veil. Maxine met Gordon, a good-looking though slightly plump Scotch College boy, at year-ten dance classes. It was the perfect Melbourne private school love story. They married after her first year out teaching.
Lisa was yin to Maxine’s yang. Traipsing two years’ behind her, she failed everywhere Maxine had triumphed, including getting a scholarship to Methodist Ladies College. Their mother said there was no way they could afford to send her as a fee-paying student. Profoundly relieved, Lisa slouched along to Camberwell Secondary College, where she couldn’t catch a ball of any size or make sense of anything the teachers droned on about, apart from English and art history.
One of the supposed advantages of Camberwell Secondary College was the presence of boys. Lisa’s handful of male friends turned out camp as Christmas, the beginning of a lifetime trend. The few girls she managed to trick or bribe into alliances were unpopular freaks like her. Prefect status was out of the question.
Lisa’s eyes strayed to the lower shelf where Maxine’s children, Nina and Andrew, drifted from babyhood to goofy adolescence inside a series of elaborate frames. Andrew, a painful introvert, had taken off to Silicon Valley, where, according to Maxine, he was about to shove a rocket up Google’s backside. Nina lived across the bay in Williamstown with her ‘nice little Chinese’ husband Dan and their small kids.
Lisa had no doubt Dan, a colorectal surgeon, had married down. The elder son from a family of Indonesian medical professionals, he had more sophistication inside his left nostril than the Frogget family put together. Maxine still shouted at him in her version of an Asian accent, while his expression settled in Buddha-like calm. The Froggets had never had a doctor in the family before, let alone a surgeon.
When Nina became pregnant the first time, Maxine lay awake at night fretting the child might come out an unacceptable shade of yellow. As it happened, little Peaches was a cherub with almond eyes, olive skin and tawny hair. By the time the other two came along, Maxine could see the bright side. With skin like that they’d get away with SPF15 instead of the standard MacNally SPF50.
Maxine hardly needed photos of her beautiful grandchildren when she saw them several times a week. They were always exquisitely turned out in French designer clothes from Dan’s mother in Jakarta.
As Maxine droned on about the benefits of holidays versus immigration, Lisa felt a stab of envy. Maxine had a husband who brought her tea and toast in bed every morning and grown-up children and grandchildren in the same city. So what if Gordon was a tax accountant who doubled as a doormat? There wasn’t a thing he wouldn’t give Maxine, including the new lime-green Volkswagen Golf sitting in the driveway. Whether he operated from adoration or fear was beside the point. He was devoted. And he was there. Maxine had it all. Yet she’d had the nerve to say Lisa was spoilt.
If Lisa had been their dad William’s favourite it was only by default. They just happened to share the kind of nervous system that imploded when people yelled and threw things. William was the only person who understood Lisa’s inability to tie shoelaces, whereas Ruby had quickly
lost patience with her. Friends laughed when her laces collapsed into spaghetti in her hands. She simply couldn’t get the hang of making a bow out of a single loop. Sensing her distress, William took her aside one day and helped her invent a new type of bow using two loops. While it didn’t hold together as well as some people’s bows, it saved Lisa’s dignity. She still used the two-looped bow.
Like all MacNallys, Ruby possessed a wild beast of a temper. She had no qualms about letting the neighbours hear her screeching at William for being a snooty good-for-nothing Trumperton. She let everyone know she’d have been better off marrying Ian Johnston the bricklayer instead of a man fifteen years older who was hardly cutting a dash at the Water Board.
‘Never mind, Panda Bear,’ William would say, running his hand gently through Lisa’s hair after one of Ruby’s tirades. ‘She’ll settle down soon.’ He didn’t have pet names for anyone else. She never found out why he called her Panda Bear. It was long before the debate about whether pandas were actually bears or not.
With his striking blue eyes and eagleish nose, William had once been handsome. Years with Ruby took their toll, however. The thick dark hair faded to silver, his shoulders stooped and the once graceful stride slowed to a limp. After he retired, he took refuge in a fibro shed to make dolls’ houses, most of them in a Georgian style not unlike Trumperton Manor. They were made so exquisitely and with such attention to detail the toyshop on Glenferrie Road couldn’t get enough of them.
When he’d died of a stroke fifteen years ago, Lisa felt part of her soul detach itself and float away. After booking flights for the funeral, she’d wandered around Central Park. The air was suddenly still. The city fell silent. Snowflakes caressed her face. She felt her father’s presence, then, softly encompassing her before spiralling away with the snow. Now all she had left of him was his Aunt Caroline. Lisa reminded herself to spend some time with the old lady.
Lisa tuned into her sister once again. Maxine’s lecture was far from over. Lisa struggled to keep her mouth shut while she yawned. Admittedly, Maxine was the one who’d been stuck in Melbourne to ride out Ruby’s later years. After a couple of incidents wandering the streets in her nightie, Ruby was deposited in the Camberwell Palace retirement home. Maxine had no hesitation reminding Lisa she was the one who visited every Sunday. And the one they called after Ruby dropped dead clutching the stuffed wombat she’d just won at bingo.
