‘Do they wonder why?’
‘No. The sugar cubes got a few queries, though.’
Pippa was joking, Gabby was almost certain.
‘All right, big man,’ Pippa said, running her hand down his neck. ‘I need to get changed.’ She was wearing clothes suitable for school drop-off and client meetings – a dress, tights and pointy flats.
Pippa went to the boot and retrieved her gym bag, which happened to have jodhpurs, a polo shirt, three-quarter-length riding boots and a helmet stashed inside. Then she pulled out another bag, this one a small suitcase on wheels, the size of carry-on aeroplane luggage. ‘This one’s for you,’ she said, the wheels grating over the bumpy ground as she wheeled it to Gabby. ‘I often carry around work stuff in this bag to take to clients, so the kids didn’t bat an eye at it.’
‘Thanks. Did you borrow some gear?’
‘No. I decided to get you an early Christmas present,’ Pippa said. ‘I went on a bit of a shopping splurge at Horseland straight after I organised agistment here and I got you a full set at the same time as I got all mine.’
‘No, Pippa, you can’t,’ Gabby said, bending down to unzip the suitcase.
‘Yes, I can and I did. Nothing brings me more pleasure in my life right now than this, so please don’t spoil the fun for me. Just say thank you,’ Pippa said wearily.
‘Are you okay?’ Gabby asked, putting her hand on Pippa’s arm. To her alarm, Pippa’s eyes filled with tears and her face crumpled. ‘What’s happened?’
Pippa shook her head and waved a hand at her. ‘Just Harvey stuff,’ she said.
‘What stuff?’
‘I think he gave me an ultimatum last night,’ she said, her voice cracking.
‘Which was?’
‘He wants more sex. And if he can’t have more sex, then he doesn’t want to be in this relationship any more.’ Pippa broke down, leaning her elbows on the wooden fence to support her head.
‘What the hell?’ Gabby was furious. ‘He can’t just demand sex! Doesn’t he know anything about women? What did you say?’
‘I said if he paid half as much attention to me as he does to his job then there might be a chance of building intimacy.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘That we should simply have sex and then we would have intimacy!’
‘Oh, for god’s sake.’ Gabby sighed, rubbing Pippa’s back. She stayed silent for a few moments, enjoying Hercules’s snuffling attention and calm vibe as he hung out with them at the fence. ‘What are you going to do?’
Pippa wiped her face and shrugged. ‘No idea.’
‘Have you thought any more about counselling?’
‘I honestly don’t think it would make a bit of difference,’ Pippa said sadly. ‘I think we’ve just come to the end of the road. It feels like we’re both just waiting for someone to make the call. Besides,’ she said, nodding towards Hercules, ‘this is my therapy, right here.’ The horse blew out a long, contented breath and flicked his tail lazily at a fly on his side.
‘Okay, let’s get our counselling session started, then,’ Gabby said. She went back to the suitcase. Inside, she found two navy polo shirts, a pair of taupe-coloured jodhpurs – fortunately in a generous size – ankle boots and a black flocked helmet. It would have cost a small fortune. She looked up to rebuke Pippa again, but her sister’s face had already brightened, her cheeks regaining their colour. It was clear this really was bringing her great happiness.
‘Thank you,’ Gabby said instead. ‘I love them.’
‘Yay!’ Pippa clapped her hands. ‘Let’s get changed.’
They got dressed in the stable the same way they’d done as teenagers, standing in the wood shavings, avoiding the damp parts, the seductive aroma of horse in the air. Hercules came in to watch, shoving his nose inside their bags, looking for treats or something to chew on. He picked up one of Gabby’s boots just as she was hopping on one foot to get to it, and made to escape before Pippa caught him and brought it back.
They were laughing so hard that Gabby forgot about her nightmare last night and instead felt completely free of responsibilities. The rest of the world – the kids, The Tin Man, the woman in the cafe, her medications, even the awful news that Pippa’s marriage really did seem to be on the edge of collapse, and everything that meant in relation to the future care of Gabby’s kids – all just fell away.
At last they were ready. Pippa put a halter on Hercules. The brass buckles were shiny and new, and jangled as she adjusted it at the side of his face.
‘Who am I riding?’ Gabby asked.
‘Did you see that Appaloosa a few yards away?’ Pippa asked, picking up a brush to clean her horse’s already near-perfect coat.
‘No. I didn’t get any further than nuzzling your little pony here.’
‘Do you know, I almost don’t notice his size any more but when I’m up there –’ Pippa nodded towards his back – ‘I feel untouchable.’
‘Lifted up,’ Gabby said.
‘Exactly.’ They fell silent for a moment, with just the soft sound of brushstrokes in the air. ‘Anyway, the Appy belongs to the woman who owns this place and she has difficulty riding these days due to a knee problem, so she’s happy to lend him out for rides.’
‘Is he safe? I’m far too old to be falling off horses.’
‘I saw someone else ride him the other day and he seems pretty quiet, a bit slow if anything.’
‘Good.’
‘Come on,’ Pippa said, flinging the brush to the corner of the stable. ‘Jump on and I’ll give you a ride over to the paddock.’
‘I can’t get up there!’
‘Yes, you can. There’s a mounting block just outside. I’ll dink you.’ She grinned.
‘No, it’s fine, I’ll just walk.’
‘Come on, it’ll be fun. Please?’
Gabby groaned. ‘What if I fall off?’
‘You’re not going to fall off. We’re walking about a hundred metres! It will take you back to our childhood.’
Gabby hesitated but agreed.
Pippa led Hercules alongside the plastic moulded mounting block and stepped up onto it, throwing his lead rope over his neck as she did.
‘Stand still, baby,’ she said, placing her hands on his back. She jumped on the spot a couple of times to get propulsion then sprang up, landing with her torso across his back and then kicking wildly with her legs to try to wiggle her way up to sitting, but she couldn’t make it. Gabby laughed.
‘Stop it!’ Pippa squeaked, trying not to laugh herself. Neither of them had been bareback on a horse in decades.
Gabby helped Pippa up, grabbing her lower leg and giving her a boost until finally she was up and sitting, triumphant.
‘There!’ Pippa said, puffing. ‘Your turn.’
Gabby couldn’t stop giggling. This horse had sent them back in time and it was absolute bliss. She was young and strong again, in her other life, the life ‘before’, somewhere on the other side of the dividing line down the centre of her chest, the weight of her worries nowhere in sight.
‘Come on,’ Pippa urged.
‘You had the easy bit,’ Gabby countered. ‘His rump’s a lot higher, so I have to jump further than you did.’
‘But you’re taller. That’s how it works.’
Gabby put her hands on Hercules’s back. He was behaving himself perfectly, having barely moved while Pippa had flailed about, only shifting one foot to account for her weight landing on him. She began to bounce, psyching herself, but the giggles kept coming.
‘Pippa, I don’t have the bladder strength for this any more,’ she said, suddenly serious. ‘What if I leap up and wet myself?’
That just made Pippa laugh more, which in turn made Gabby collapse again too. They were having the wildest time and they hadn’t even begun to ride. At last, Gabby coughed and took some deep breaths. ‘I need to focus. I might be able to jump, and I can laugh, but I’m not sure I can do both at the same time.’
‘Serious f
ace,’ Pippa said, waving her hand over her face like a magician, setting her mouth. But the mirth was just below the surface. All Gabby had to do was catch her eye and it sent them into peals of laughter.
‘That’s it, I give up!’ Gabby stepped away from Hercules. ‘I’m going to walk.’
She stepped down off the block and held out her hand for the rope, which Pippa handed over. Gabby led Hercules to the other paddock, grinning, all the weight magically lifted from her mind and spirit. Between her dog and this horse, they might just be able to solve all the problems of the world.
14
‘Hi, Janice, it’s Krystal. I can’t come in to work today, sorry. Coming down with something. I’m going to drop Jasper off and head back home. See you Monday.’
Krystal disconnected the call, glad that Janice hadn’t answered her phone and she could just leave a voicemail. It was raining and the temperature had dropped again, a retreat to winter weather, and the darkness of the clouds seemed to fill her small apartment and drag her mood down further. She couldn’t deal with Janice’s power suits and heels today, nor sorting endless lost property, printing out head lice warnings or collating permission slips for the swimming carnival. Some days, it was just all too hard.
She rugged up her boys in long fleecy pants and jumpers, and hustled them into school and day care before driving numbly back home. After flopping back into bed and staring at the wall for nearly an hour, she forced herself to get up. She made some instant noodles and ate them. Then her thoughts turned to vodka. It was nearly eleven o’clock. That wasn’t too bad, was it? Sure, pubs didn’t open before midday, but it wasn’t like she was going to drink all day. She wasn’t some kind of drunk.
‘Pull yourself together, Krystal.’ She took her bowl to the kitchen and washed it, then forced herself to turn away from the cupboard above the fridge where the alcohol was kept and do laundry instead. Forced herself to think of all the terrible things her mother used to do when she was drinking, of all the ways she let her children down.
She folded clothes and put them away. Put a batch of muffins into the oven for school lunches. Found the missing library books. Scrubbed the awful mouldy bits from around the bathroom taps. Threw away the odd socks that had been sitting in a pile in the laundry room for months. Made a shopping list.
‘Just be a good mum. That’s all you have to do.’
But, oh, the ghosts were haunting her today. The memories of Evan. Thoughts of Cordelia-Aurora and the Arthurs at that horrible party. Of being escorted out of The Tin Man.
She looked around the apartment. The only reason she and Evan had bought an apartment here in St Kilda was because they’d both been working in the restaurant nearby. It had no view, except of the walls of the neighbouring buildings. But she’d left the restaurant when she was six months pregnant with Jasper, and now the boys were getting bigger. They were so active. The walls had scuff marks from shoes and soccer balls, and their squeals and chatter ricocheted around the small space. Life was moving on without Evan.
Maybe she should move out to the suburbs. Evan’s life insurance had paid off the apartment and given her a little bit to put away. Moving further out would mean more space for the boys and a bit more money in the bank to play with.
She touched the flags that stretched across the window looking out onto the apartment block next door. They were made of rough jute and dyed in bright colours that cheered even the greyest of outlooks. She and Evan had bought them at a stall at the Queen Victoria Market one scorching hot summer’s day. She liked it when Evan was hot and flustered, red and sweating, without any of the traces of haughtiness that sometimes filtered through from his upbringing. He was just a limp, damp mess like the rest of society, eating ice cream and guzzling water from plastic bottles that were never cold enough.
There were so many memories here in this apartment. She’d already lost so much of Evan; she wasn’t sure she could lose this too.
Her dark mood swirled to anger. That ridiculous party last weekend had reignited her resentment at years of rejection by the Arthur family, especially Cordelia-Aurora, from the very first day they met.
Six months into their relationship, when Krystal was still only twenty-two years old, Evan had taken her to meet his family. She’d been anxious that his delay in introducing her had meant that he didn’t see a future for the two of them, but he assured her it was more to shield her from them.
‘They can be difficult,’ he’d said. ‘Especially my sister.’
‘She’s mad at you for leaving the firm.’
‘That, and other sibling stuff.’
The date was set for Christmas Day, possibly the worst day in the history of dating for a new addition to meet the family, but as Krystal didn’t have anywhere else to be and Evan felt compelled to see his parents, she insisted she go with him.
‘It has to be one day. Why not today?’ They were at her place – a tiny one-bedroom apartment above a Chinese takeaway, where the smell of fried onions and soy sauce clung permanently to the air-conditioning vents, and each afternoon before they left for work they heard Mrs Kravitz next door crying into her chicken and sweet corn soup as she watched the news. She was only young, still in her thirties, but had lost her husband six months ago after a short and vicious illness; they’d had no children, and Krystal couldn’t imagine anything worse.
‘Because I’d rather stay here with you,’ he said, his voice husky, kissing her nose and lowering the bedsheet to reveal her naked body and lay tiny kisses across her chest.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘How bad could it be?’
‘Bad, trust me,’ he said, inching his way down between her breasts.
He murmured, getting back to delighting in her body for the third time since coming home late from the restaurant. They were both always so wired from the intensity of service that it took them ages to come down. It didn’t matter though. They slept in late each day, rarely rising before midday, and lived their lives in the nocturnal hours.
‘Well, it’ll be a quick trip then,’ she said, and broke out into squeals of pleasure as his tongue traced her hip bone, and the next little while was spent most definitely not thinking about the Arthur family.
But Christmas Day awoke hot and angry, and Krystal and Evan endured the slow crawl down to the peninsula to the white-pillared home of his parents, which in the future she would come to think of as The White House and to dread visiting more than having her wisdom teeth out.
She’d worn a simple yellow dress with red sandals, and brushed her long hair till it was shiny and put it up in a high ponytail. She was bringing Ivy and Wyatt a fruit cake which she’d made herself, having looked up a recipe online and bought all the ingredients and a square baking tin, and burned herself on the boiling mixture. She’d smothered the cake with thick white icing because it had broken just a little when she’d flipped it out of the tin.
She’d been very proud of her cake, tying a silver ribbon around it and adding a decorative piece of holly on top and covering it carefully with a triple layer of cling wrap for the drive down.
‘You really don’t have to take them anything,’ Evan had said several times, looking anxious, and she’d assumed it was because he knew her cooking skills were limited. She’d taken it as a challenge to show him she could be thoughtful and clever and lovable.
‘I know, but I want to,’ she said.
Finally, he stopped trying to talk her out of it and simply kissed her on the forehead. ‘You’re so sweet.’
She knew Evan’s family were well off, but she was utterly thrown by the magnitude of wealth on display. The white pillars and walls of the house were blinding in the light and there were so many rounded layers it looked like a ghastly wedding cake. A heavily manicured lawn sparkled with tiny rainbows from invisible sprinklers in the ground that were sending out mists of water droplets. Evan parked alongside lush topiaries. Aside from the fountain in the centre of the circular driveway, all was silent.
Back in her m
other’s fibro shack in the Dandenongs, Christmas Day hadn’t been a barrel of laughs, but it was anything but silent, with the throaty revs of motorbikes, her mother’s latest boyfriend’s tools hitting the concrete floor of the carport with loud clangs, music blaring from car speakers, clinking beer bottles, whining dogs and bursts of drunken laughter.
Evan put his arm around her shoulders, squeezing her to him, not saying a word but, she thought, able to sense her plummeting courage as her soft footsteps neared the house. It was Cordelia-Aurora who met them, just after Evan pushed open the front door. Not a moment after he’d called hello she was there, gliding across the tiled floor as though she didn’t even need to walk, but invisible servants just picked her up and carried her wherever she needed to go.
‘Evan, darling, you look too thin,’ she purred, kissing him on the cheek.
‘Hello to you too,’ he said, stiffly.
Krystal stood with a stupid smile plastered on her sweaty face, waiting for Evan’s big sister to acknowledge her, or at least glance in her direction, but Cordelia-Aurora’s eyes were locked firmly onto Evan.
‘How was the drive? Was it terrible?’ she asked him. Not even a flicker of an eye movement in Krystal’s direction.
By now, Krystal’s smile had waned and she could feel the corners of her mouth wanting to draw down hard. Her cheeks flared with the embarrassment of someone who’d brought a homemade cake to this freaking palace.
‘I’d like you to meet Krystal.’ Evan forced Cordelia-Aurora to look at Krystal.
Cordelia-Aurora sighed …
She sighed!
… and slid her eyes to Krystal’s, nodding at her.
‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ Krystal said, and thrust out her hand.
Cordelia-Aurora looked down, very slowly, as if considering whether or not to touch the thing that was hovering between them. Some kind of finishing school manners must have kicked in because she roused herself, took Krystal’s hand (though didn’t squeeze it), tilted her head and said, ‘Pleasure. Thank you for coming.’
The Gift of Life Page 13
