As for recent photos of herself and Nick together . . . It felt like they’d hardly been in the same room together for months, let alone in front of the same camera. She turned and gazed at the back wall of the office. Thirty-two photos of her and Nick looked back at her. They were another tradition she had started the year they were married. An annual photo of the two of them in the same position, standing in front of the homestead gate, the big stone house behind, that huge sky above, all space and light. Each year she’d sent one print back home to her parents in London and framed another for this wall. As the years had gone by, the children had appeared in the photos too. Angela stood now and looked at each picture in turn. Not at her own image, but at Nick standing to her left in every photo, six foot one to her five foot five.
He hadn’t changed much over the years, as tall, lean and tanned in the most recent photo as he was in the earlier ones. She reached for the first picture, studying it closely, clearly remembering this early moment of their married lives. It had taken them eight tries to get the self-timing camera to work properly. They’d been about to give up when it clicked. She was looking straight at the camera, wearing a cornflower-blue cotton dress the same colour as her eyes, her hair a mass of black curls, her smile wide if somewhat frozen after so many attempts to get the shot. Beside her, Nick was dressed in dark jeans and a white shirt, his sleeves rolled up. He wasn’t only smiling but laughing, completely relaxed, indulging her, gazing down at her with such amusement. Such pride. Such love.
She felt that jolt inside her again. Like a sudden pain, a pang. She still couldn’t put an exact name on it. Was it sadness? Fear? Confusion? All of those and something else. It was the closest she’d felt to homesickness since she was a child. A longing for someone. The feeling of missing them, wanting them so badly that it physically hurt. It was how she had felt about Nick for months now. She couldn’t understand it, no matter how much she tried. How could it be that her husband could be so physically close to her every day, beside her in bed every night, yet so far away, so distant, so —
‘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 email. 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 from 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 neighbours, they had needed some extra income. While Angela had often helped with the practical side of station life, Nick had never discussed the station’s finances with her in detail, 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 had not just a flair for 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 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 when they weren’t in use by Errigal’s contract shearers. At last count, nearly five hundred people had stayed 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 dramatic landscape, pointing out not just Wilpena Pound, St Mary’s Peak and Rawnsley Bluff, 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’d heard them all from Nick, from their Aboriginal stockmen, from their neighbours. She loved sharing not only the stories, but all the statistics too. Their property was 70 000 hectares, 700 square kilometres. At its peak, before the drought, it had been home to ten thousand sheep. Huge numbers, but the property 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 four-wheel drive. She’d taken her guests to all the best lookout spots, enjoying their delight in photographing not just the scenery, 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, about the Adnyamathanha people who had first lived there. 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. Sometimes they even camped out under the stars. She’d learned all the constellations over the years – the Southern Cross, the Pointers, different stars to 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 some day, Ig! He’d featured in many of their guests’ photos over the years as well, 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 favourite guests. Everything they’d seen, from the smallest bird to the most vivid red sunset over the nearby ranges, had been declared ‘absolutely one hundred per cent 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 colours 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 m
ention of any tensions. Edited out any sticky subjects. It had felt like the right thing to do, even if she knew her family sometimes sounded too good to be true.
She felt her headache pulse faster and rubbed at 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 neighbour Joan, a station wife and former nurse. In her mid-sixties, straight-talking and kind, Joan was Angela’s 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 kilometres apart – but they spoke on the phone regularly, sometimes 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 summarise 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 afterwards. Not after years of being the person in her family who smoothed things over and kept everyone happy. So she’d continued to be the good, kind, polite 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 neighbour 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 was 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 verandah 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 was 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 schoolfriends 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 neighbours 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 got 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 were 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 colouring, 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 afterwards.
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 his soul, she could tell he was kind, intelligent, amused, admiring. That night, he walked her back to her hostel. She added good manners to his list of qualities. They didn’t kiss then. They met for lunch at his hotel the next day, kissed as they were saying goodbye 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 a 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 travelled miles over the years to meet there and pray . . .
It wasn’t a chapel any more. It had long been deconsecrated. Fifteen years earlier, an electrical storm had blown 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, tyres on loose gravel. Eventually, the stiller she became, 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 at a 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 got 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 got themselves into all these physical scrapes, had they? If they had, she’d conveniently forgotten them. But having a son had taken her by surprise in so many ways. Her intense love for Ig had taken her by surprise. What wa
s that joke? ‘If your mother tells you that she doesn’t have a favourite child, then you’re not her favourite child.’ That didn’t apply to Angela, though. She didn’t have any favourites. 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 rose bush that Nick had planted for her as a surprise first-anniversary present, which still miraculously produced bright-red blooms, despite the droughts and heatwaves 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 . . .
Further away again, kilometre after kilometre 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 —
All Together Now Page 20
