Hello from the Gillespies

by Monica McInerney

  CHAPTER NINE

  Angela was in her pottery studio. She’d been there for the past hour, ever since she’d re-read her letter. She wasn’t working. She was hiding.

  On her way out there, Ig had called her over to admire his latest cubby. It was very impressive, she told him honestly. He’d arranged all of Lindy’s cardboard boxes, still filled with thread and stuffing, into an elaborate structure. After he’d pointed out all the features, she told him she was just going to do some work on her new sculptures.

  ‘Do you need a spider check first?’ he asked.

  She’d been too distracted to even think about spiders. Thank God he’d remembered. She nodded. In her three decades living out here, she’d grown accustomed to snakes, to kangaroos, to lizards, locusts, mice and rats. But never to the spiders. Especially not the huge, hand-sized spiders that seemed to lie in wait in dark corners just for her. Nick had rescued her from them for years. So had the girls, who had grown up fearless. Lately, it had become Ig’s job. He wasn’t keen on snakes, she knew, but he was very relaxed about spiders.

  He opened the blue-painted door of the studio for her, tugging at it three times before it opened. The hinges needed oiling. The climbing red rose bush that grew around it, the one Nick had planted for her on their first wedding anniversary, needed pruning too, she noticed. One more item for her To Do list. She waited in the doorway as Ig fetched the torch she kept inside for just this purpose. He started to shine it around the small shed, which had just enough room for her compact kiln, the pottery wheel, two tall racks of shelves and an old wooden bench. All perfect spider hiding places.

  ‘You’d better look away,’ Ig said from inside. ‘It’s pretty big. A huntsman, I think.’

  She shuddered. A huntsman. Huge, hairy. Not poisonous, but still . . . She moved several metres back, resisting a temptation to go even further. She shut her eyes too, but was still able to picture what she knew Ig was doing in there. Picking up – actually picking up, in his bare hands – a spider. He could have killed it, but as he’d told her solemnly once, it wasn’t the spider’s fault she didn’t like it.

  She opened her eyes as he returned, wiping his hands on his shorts.

  ‘All clear,’ he said. ‘You can go in now.’

  ‘What would I do without you, Ig?’ she’d said.

  He’d given her his shy, sweet smile, then headed back to his cubby, talking to Robbie as he went.

  Since then, she had been sitting here, on the bench, rolling the same ball of clay round and around in her hands. She hadn’t even made a start on shaping it into any discernible form. All she’d been doing was fighting an urge to run away. To get into the car and drive as fast as she could away from this mess she had created.

  Reason took over. She couldn’t run away. There was too much to do. Party food to make and freeze. The woolshed to decorate. All the party gear had been delivered, the chairs and the trestle tables. She could start unpacking those. Or perhaps she could drive over to Joan’s, get some face-to-face advice. An hour’s journey across dirt roads. No. She had to try something else.

  She took five breaths in, five breaths out. Again.

  She let her mind drift. She used all the tricks she’d learned over the past months.

  Slowly, surely, it began to work.

  She wasn’t on a sheep station in outback South Australia on a hot, dusty December day. She hadn’t somehow sent out her innermost secrets to one hundred people around the world. She didn’t have four children in various states of disarray, or a husband who had lost interest in her. She wasn’t about to host two hundred people in a dusty woolshed, all of whom probably hated her and her family. She wasn’t sitting in a small stone shed full of pottery equipment she didn’t know how to use properly, beside shelves of half-finished sculptures that looked like they belonged in a kindergarten. No, that wasn’t her and this wasn’t her life.

  She was Angela Richardson. It was mid-morning in London. She’d been up since seven a.m. It was a cold and frosty December day, but her little studio at the end of the garden was warm. Her husband Will had turned on the heater before he left for an early breakfast meeting. Not only that, he’d made a thermos of coffee for her and left it on the shelf beside her kiln. Not just the coffee, but a note too. Have a great day. I love you, Will xx. Had there ever been a husband as thoughtful as Will? As loving? As demonstrative?

  On her way to the studio, she’d picked up the pile of mail from the mat. One bill that they would have no problem paying, because they had plenty of money. More than they knew what to do with. An invitation from a gallery asking – actually, almost begging – her to consider them for her next ceramics exhibition. And a card from her daughter Lexie. Lexie often put little notes in the post: postcards, photographs of objects or shapes that she thought her mother might find inspirational. Today’s card was no exception. It was a card with a drawing of a robin on the cover, a gloriously bright-red, plump little bird, with a gleam in its black eye, standing jauntily on its matching black legs. Inside Lexie had written just one line: To add to your collection! Love you, Lexie xxx.

  Could Lexie get any sweeter? Angela doubted it. She had told Lexie two months ago that she was thinking about using robins, her favourite birds, as the theme for her next collection. She’d loved them since she was a child. Their curiosity. Their territorial natures. The way she only needed to step outside and pull up a single weed and one would appear, as much to keep an eye on her as to look out for a worm. She especially loved robins in December and January, when the garden was so bleak. Sometimes it would make her feel sad to look out from her studio and see the flowerbeds dormant, the old oak tree bare, the roses that were so glorious in the summer now just branches in the grey light. But then, in the corner of her vision, a flash of movement, a splash of colour. A robin! She’d watch it for as long as it was there, loving the darting, bobbing movements, the little pecks at the food she had left on the bird table for it, and most of all, loving the life and colour it brought into the garden.

  At that moment, Angela’s mobile rang. It was Suzy, the manager of the gift shop in Islington’s Camden Passage, just three streets away.

  ‘Angela, how are you? Look, darling, this is beyond cheeky of me, but I’m ringing to ask, do you have anything up your sleeve gift-wise this year? I was expecting a delivery of clay angels, lovely little things, but they’re stuck in transit in Antwerp, of all places. Won’t get here until mid-January. Fat lot of good they’ll be to me then. But I thought, angel, Angela, maybe you’ve had a burst of inspiration and have exactly what I need? You remember those bells you made a few years ago? The little ones? You don’t have any of those left, do you? Or anything Christmassy at all? My loyal and rich customers will be arriving any day now, arms outstretched, credit cards ready, and I can’t bear to think they might leave empty-handed and me empty-tilled.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Angela said, confidently, clearly. ‘But not bells.’

  ‘No? What?’

  ‘Robins,’ she said. ‘I’m making robins this year. A simple design. Clay base colour, with a burst of red glaze on the chest. I can have a sample to you tomorrow.’ She hadn’t even made one yet, but she already knew it would be a success.

  ‘I love robins! Everyone loves robins! You’re a genius! I don’t even need to see them. I’ll order as many as you can make.’

  Angela started work as soon as she hung up. It was as if her fingers already knew what they were doing. She moulded the little round body, the delicate head. She used wire for the spindly legs. She had plenty of that in the garden shed. The clay was light, the whole object would be light too, perfect to hang on a tree or to rest on a windowsill . . .

  By seven p.m. she had a dozen made. She was around at Suzy’s early the next morning. Suzy loved them. They were divine, she said. They had such personality. Such charm. How quickly could she make more?

  ‘Angela Richardson, you are incredible,’ Will said that night, raising a glass over the set table, the rich s
picy smell of the beef casserole he’d cooked filling their warm kitchen. ‘May I propose a toast to you and your robins.’

  ‘To robins,’ Angela said, laughing, clinking her glass against his.

  ‘Who’s Robyn?’

  Angela opened her eyes. Lindy stood in the doorway, holding her cushion cover.

  ‘I thought Ig was bad enough, talking to Robbie all the time. Now you’re at it. Who’s Robyn? Robbie’s sister?’

  ‘Not Robyn. Robin. As in the bird.’

  ‘You were talking to a bird? It’s worse than I thought.’ She held out the cover. ‘Look, Mum, two words down, one to go.’

  ‘Beautiful, Lindy. Well done.’

  ‘You hardly looked at it. Does it matter that the W is a bit wobbly?’

  ‘Of course not. We don’t have robins in Australia, Lindy, did you know that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There aren’t any robins in Australia. The early settlers tried to introduce them, and then scientists more recently, but it’s never worked. The climate’s wrong for them. The robins that people call robins here aren’t actually real robins. They’re from a different bird family altogether.’

  ‘Really? That’s amazing.’ Ig appeared beside her. Lindy gave him a look, raising her eyebrows. ‘Mum’s talking about birds, Ig. You like birds, don’t you? I’ll leave you both to it.’ She left.

  Ig came in and sat on the bench beside her. ‘What birds, Mum?’

  ‘Robins, Ig. They were my favourite birds when I was growing up in England. Do you know the ones I mean? The little ones with the bright-red breasts?’

  He thought about that for a moment. ‘I think I’ve seen them in films.’

  ‘I used to really love them. When I was a little kid, like you. We always had them in our garden.’

  ‘Do you still miss them?’

  She nodded. ‘I thought I didn’t but I really do.’

  ‘Do you want me to go and get some paper and draw you one? You’d have to tell me what to draw but I could try.’

  She didn’t know who was more shocked, herself or Ig, when her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

  ‘I’d love that, Ig. Thank you.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  In New York, Genevieve had almost finished packing. Not that it had taken long. In her time here, she’d lived in what she would have termed dog kennels back in Australia: tiny apartments in the East Village. They’d all been up several flights of stairs, with small windows looking down into similar apartments or onto brick walls and fire escapes. Nothing like the vast rooms she’d seen on Friends. She’d learned to keep her wardrobe small. She’d bought some artwork, but again, small paintings only, knowing one day they’d have to be shipped home. The time had come.

  Megan had rung her the night of her sacking. Coffee Guy, the kind security guard, had obviously kept his word and passed on Genevieve’s personal phone number.

  ‘Girlfriend!’ Megan had shouted. ‘It was you all along! We have to meet!’

  They’d met the next night, in a bar they knew film folk didn’t go to. Megan’s idea. At least she was honest. ‘You’re radioactive, darling, sorry. If I’m seen with you, I might get sacked too.’

  The set had been in an uproar after her revelations, Megan told her in technicolour detail. Work on the surface, of course, but gossip at every opportunity.

  ‘The director’s brother, Coffee Guy, said —’

  ‘His brother? I thought he was just the security guard.’

  ‘He’s a man of many talents, I discovered. He was also asking lots of questions about you today. His name is Matt, by the way. I told him he should ring and ask you himself if he was that concerned. I said he’d better be quick, before you disappear into the outback. I still can’t picture it, you and your dreadlocks back there. Won’t you scare the kangaroos?’

  ‘They’re not easily scared.’ Genevieve tried to imagine walking down the streets of Hawker looking like she did. Perhaps if she was just home on holiday she could brazen it out. But skulking back, with her tail between her legs . . . ‘Megan, would you come back to my place and do me a favour?’

  ‘And fix up that blue rats’ nest of yours? I thought you’d never ask.’

  Back at the apartment, Genevieve’s phone rang as Megan was midway through her new hairstyle. They’d opened a bottle of wine. Everything that had previously seemed worrying seemed hilarious now. Genevieve was giggling as she answered.

  ‘You sound okay,’ a man’s voice said. ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘It’s Matt. Matt from the film set.’

  ‘Well, hello, Matt from the film set,’ she said. Megan gave her a thumbs up. ‘Yes, I’m great, thanks. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. I’ll get to spend more time with my family now. Isn’t that what politicians say when they’ve been publicly humiliated?’

  Megan was waving at her, mouthing at her to clam up, slow down.

  Genevieve took her advice. ‘I’m sorry, Matt. Please excuse that little rush of bitterness. I’m fine. Really. Thanks.’

  ‘Megan tells me you’re going back to Australia?’

  ‘On Tuesday, yes.’

  He’d been so kind. She’d really enjoyed talking to him on the set. He was also great-looking.

  They talked over each other.

  ‘Would you like to meet for a drink before I go?’ she said.

  ‘Can I buy you a farewell-to-New-York drink?’ he said.

  More thumbs up from Megan.

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Genevieve said. ‘At nine. Great. Yes, I know that bar. Thanks, Matt. That’s great.’

  Megan whooped as she hung up. ‘A date! That calls for dancing. Come on, let’s go out again.’

  As they left, Genevieve caught sight of herself in the hallway mirror. Her hair was half-finished, blue dreadlocks on one side, an emerging pixie cut on the other.

  ‘Could you finish this first, do you think?’ she said.

  The following night, she was regretting not just the last glass of wine with Megan, not just the haircut, but also accepting the date. She’d woken up that morning with another hangover, in a pit of dread. This date with Matt was probably a set-up, to find out what else she knew about the director. The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. Why else would he get in touch with her?

  She rang Megan, using the code name they’d decided on. ‘It’s me. Ophelia.’ She talked quickly, comparing hangovers, and then airing her theory.

  ‘I think you’re wrong,’ Megan said. ‘I talked to him again today. He’s a really nice guy. I’ve also asked around. Everyone had only good things to say about him. Smart, funny, decent. Much nicer than his brother. Chill, Ophelia. Enjoy.’

  She rang Victoria too, of course. Her sister gave her blessing as well. She also asked for a full report as soon as possible afterwards.

  It took Genevieve only five minutes to fix her new-look hair. She’d given herself a fright when she looked in the mirror first thing, expecting to see the blue dreadlocks and instead being greeted by this dark-brown pixie cut. It felt like years since she’d seen her natural hair colour. She liked it. She liked the style too. She quickly applied more eye make-up than usual. Lipstick. Sparkling earrings. She had a big collection of costume jewellery, including some pretty hairpins. They’d been lost in her blue hair. They looked great with this new short look, if she did say so herself.

  She was at the bar five minutes before nine. She found a table at two minutes to nine. She was taking a sip of a glass of red wine at nine o’clock, steadying her nerves and quelling her hangover. At ten minutes past nine she realised she had been stood up. She’d been toying with her phone, pretending to text while waiting for word from Matt, but there’d been nothing. Was she angry? Maybe. More disappointed. He’d seemed nicer than that. Decent. She’d just picked up her glass to swallow the rest of the wine and then go home when she heard her name.

  ‘Genevieve?’

  She spun around with the wine glass in h
er hand. So quickly that her drink flew out of the glass. Not onto her. Onto Matt. Matt and his white shirt.

  An hour later, she sent that wine a big thanks. If she hadn’t spilt it, his shirt wouldn’t have been covered in a large red stain. There wouldn’t have been three minutes of flustered conversation as he apologised for seeming to be late. He’d been in the bar since before nine, looking out for a woman with blue dreadlocks. It was only on his fifth circuit around that he recognised her sitting on her own in a corner. She wouldn’t have laughed and apologised for not warning him about the haircut, and for spilling the wine. He wouldn’t have asked whether she minded being with someone who looked like he’d just been shot. She wouldn’t have suggested he come to her apartment to rinse out the stain.

  If they hadn’t been in her apartment, perhaps they wouldn’t have begun talking so easily, laughing so readily. About work. About her family. His family. Australia. America. Films they liked. Books they liked. Music they liked. If they hadn’t got talking, and laughing, they wouldn’t have started kissing. And normally she didn’t have sex on the first date and this wasn’t even a date, it was just a drink, but he was there in her living room which doubled as her bedroom, courtesy of the fold-down bed, and he was so lovely, and she was leaving and she suddenly wanted a final New York adventure, something great and romantic and fun and carefree.

  She kissed him first. Or did he kiss her first? Whoever started it, it set off a wave of lust and urgency that seemed to surprise them both. Was this what all those casual, friendly chats in front of the coffee van had been leading to? If she had known he knew how to do this with his lips and his fingers and his body, she would have locked him in the trailer with her long ago.

  After the second time, she lay her head back on the pillow and said the first word that came to mind.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Wow yourself,’ he said, with the smile that she’d already fallen a little bit in love with.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ she asked. ‘A cigarette?’

  ‘Do you have to move to get either of those things?’