Will looked on with amusement, raising his eyebrow at me from across the table when they said, ‘Come on, Lulu the Poo Poo,’ or regaled him tales from my teens – ‘Remember when she tried to pierce her own ears?’ ‘Oh, the blood, the blood,’ Mattie cried, reeling around the room in mock terror.
Will seemed to be around much more during their stay, taking the boys out in the boat, or showing Harry all the work that had been done to WIASA, Harry as happy talking about blocked pipes and S-bends, Rose said, as a pig in mud.
Mattie and Sam hadn’t chosen to continue the family tradition of plumbing the depths of excellence, but if Harry was disappointed not to add ‘and Sons’ to the de Longland company name, he never showed it. He loved having two boys at uni, both of them studying physiotherapy, both of them, he’d brag to anyone who’d listen, capable of fixing his crook back from years of bending over pipes.
But he still loved a bit of tradie talk, especially with someone like Will who, Harry said, ‘knew a bit about everything’.
‘I hope my father’s not stalking you,’ I said to Will one morning after Harry had been chatting to him about fixing up the boat shed.
‘Nah,’ Will laughed, ‘I like having him around, he’s a good bloke.’
Then he reached out for my cheek.
‘And it gives me an excuse to hang around you a bit more.’
My stomach did a little flip as our eyes locked together for an instant, but I stepped back out of his reach.
The truth was, from the moment I first saw him, it registered that Will Barton was a very attractive man, in the same way that you register that the sun comes up every morning, but I was in no shape to contemplate any sort of dalliance.
I wasn’t ready, I didn’t deserve it, so I stepped out of the way, brushing Will, and what he’d said, aside.
Over the next few days, it was easy to forget his words, lost in the cacophony Mattie and Sam created. I loved having my brothers around, so grown-up now, so loud, so busy.
Sometimes, as much as I loved Willow, there were days that hung empty in the afternoon and nights where the casuarinas nudged at my window, and I would lie and listen and wrap my fingers deep in Barney’s coat.
Now my brothers’ long bodies and strangely deep voices seemed to fill every room, where they ate, and strummed at guitars, and played tricks on their sister – like, I discovered the day after they’d gone, putting rotting crab shells in her laundry basket.
On the morning they left – Harry warning me not to get too fat on all the food Rose had packed into the deep freeze, Rose pretending to be offended – I watched Will take them all the way across the bay, then turned to walk home, Barney close beside me, the weight of his body against my legs. He leant into me along the path, his head knocking against my knees, up to the front door and onto the couch, where he lay panting beside me.
I lay back and took in the silence: no Harry banging away at the gurgling pipes of the WIASA, no Mattie and Sam playing touch footy in the front yard with Boris and Will, and no Rose.
No Rose singing in the kitchen in Lauren as she rolled and sliced and cut and mixed and told me, for the first time, about us.
Harry and the boys had gone out with Will in the boat and we’d had the whole afternoon to ourselves. Rose, making two lasagnes – one for us, one for Julia and Boris – had put them out to cool and said, ‘Let’s go for a walk, Lulu, it’s too nice a day to be stuck inside.’
I had thought so too, but a childhood spent watching her in the kitchen and not daring to ask if she would like to come anywhere at all still lingered. So I had not suggested a walk myself, despite the fact that every day of my family’s visit, most of her dresses had an airing – and I knew, without having to peek in her suitcase, that there would be no Doris days on this holiday.
‘Let’s go,’ I smiled, whistling for Barney.
We walked, my mother and me, along the edge of the water all the way to Pipers Point and back again.
Then Rose looked out at the water, slipped her arm around me, and began to speak.
‘When I was about sixteen, Lulu, I started to panic,’ she said, keeping her eyes fixed on the ocean. ‘I don’t know why. It felt like all these little knocks just behind my heart, hammering away inside me.
‘I managed to hide it for a long time, but it wouldn’t go away, and the knocks got louder and louder, and when I was nineteen I was sent to hospital for treatment and then I was in and out, and in and out of there for months, and one time when I was out I met your father.’
We began to walk again, her arm still around my shoulders, her eyes still on the bobbing sea.
‘I told him how I was, Lulu, I told him I was too much to take on, but he said, “I’ll take you on, Rose,” and he did.
‘The next few years were up and down, but Harry and I were in it together, so I was lucky, and then I fell pregnant with you.’
She turned to face me, and took both my hands in hers.
‘I’m sorry, Lulu,’ she said, ‘but I was no good at it, no good at you from the moment you were born.
‘All the other mothers were holding on to their babies like their life depended on it, but on the day I took you home I was holding you and I needed to get something from my bag, and a nurse was passing by, and I held you out to her and I said, “Here, can you hold that for a minute?”
‘I hated myself for calling you “that”, even though the nurse laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Mrs de Longland, it’s just sleep deprivation.” But I knew it wasn’t.
‘We took you home and Harry carried you inside, and I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea.’
Rose shook her head. ‘I spent years in that damned kitchen,’ she said. ‘I’d look out the window and see you and your father playing in the backyard, I’d watch the way he’d throw you into the air and I wanted to run outside and push him out of the way so I could be the one to catch you, but I couldn’t do it. All I could do was stay in that kitchen and try to bake my way to goodness.’
I smiled at her, remembering the packets of Taylor’s self-raising flour sitting on our kitchen bench, the company’s high-topped slogan known by generations of Australian women: ‘Bake Your Way to Goodness.’
‘Oh, Rose,’ I said, both of us now smiling at the absurdity of trying so damn hard to follow a slogan – its writer could never have known how literally at least one woman took it.
‘Then,’ Rose continued, ‘then the twins came.’
I remembered that too, my two squawking, squealing brothers who, it seemed to me, took what little my mother had left to give, then sent her scurrying back into the kitchen where she stayed and stayed and stayed, until Harry and I knew it was up to us to help them grow up.
‘You were marvellous to them, Lulu, you did everything I should have done, everyone kept saying what a wonderful little mother you were, do you remember that?’
I nodded. ‘I hated being called that.’
‘I hated it, too,’ Rose said, ‘because you were not a little mother, Lulu, you were my daughter and I failed you.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ I began, but she shook her head.
‘I did, I didn’t mean to for a second, but I did.’
We had begun walking again, this time in silence, picking our way across the smooth, grey rocks strewn between a small arc of coastline.
We walked towards the end of the headland, and she linked her arm with mine.
‘What I wanted to tell you, Tallulah, what I probably should have told you years ago was that all that time, when it was Harry you’d run to when you’d hurt yourself, all those times when it was his arms that caught you, not mine, I loved you.
‘It might have been from afar, Tallulah,’ she continued, taking my face once more in her hands, ‘but I loved you, with every single breath I had in me.’
There was a loud knock, bringing me abruptl
y back from the beach with my mother to the back door where Julia stood, asking me over for dinner.
‘Thought you might be a bit lonely with your family gone,’ she said.
No, I told her, I was all right, and there was no need for her to cook, Rose had left both of us a lasagne, enough for several dinners, to keep us warm.
Besides, for the next few weeks I had very little chance to feel lonely, much less alone. Duncan had always told me you never knew how many friends you had until you moved to the beach. ‘No man is an island, Lulu,’ he’d say, ‘especially when he lives on one.’
It was about a week after my family left, a week spent finding my brothers’ belongings scattered throughout the house like pieces of flotsam and jetsam – a sock here, a CD there, some boxer shorts under the bed – when Barney’s staccato visitor’s bark rang through the rafters.
I went to my bedroom window to see a figure coming up Avalon Road, knowing instantly from each loping step who was paying me a visit.
Ben.
Barney tore out the front door, careering towards him like a hairy bowling ball heading for the pins, knocking him to his knees on impact. Ben laughed and threw his arms around Barney’s neck, the breeze carrying his voice up to me.
‘Barney boy,’ he said, ‘oh mate, is it good to see you.’
It felt strange to see him, both familiar and unfamiliar at once, and I was torn between running down the stairs myself to bowl him over, and shrinking back behind the curtains and pretending I wasn’t home.
The last time I had seen him was at Duncan’s funeral, a strange, brief moment where we had hugged awkwardly, and he had left straight after the service. Before that, we’d met a few times to divvy up the domestic spoils of our previous life together – ‘Do you want the Ikea wine rack?’ – and for me to return my keys to our old apartment.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I’d said – again – as I handed them over.
‘I know,’ he’d answered, taking them.
Since then, I’d heard bits and pieces about him from Simone and Stella, who imparted the rather startling information that she sometimes saw him at church. Since he’d never gone when we were together, I could only think he now went to fall on his knees and thank God I wasn’t in his life anymore.
‘How did he look?’ I’d asked Stella one day when she reported a sighting.
‘Pious,’ Simone answered for her.
Ben was, I thought, well shot of me, but it didn’t stop me missing him, or our old life together. Sometimes I’d think about our flat, the twenty-seven steps up to its front door, Ben’s bike in the hallway, the newspaper spread out on the kitchen table in the morning, and find myself aching for the normality of it. Even though I knew deep down that he was probably not the right man for me, he was a good man, and there were times I had wondered if that could have been enough.
Now he was here, and I could not stand hiding behind the curtains forever, so I ran down the stairs and flung open the door.
‘Ben,’ I said, ‘what a nice surprise!’
He smiled, tucking his hair – it had grown, I noticed, and suited him – behind his ears, like he always did when he was nervous, then thrust a package into my hands.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘this is for you.’
Then he told me he was getting married.
Monica Golliana wore a size six shoe, had dark brown curly hair which she mostly wore pulled off her face, was a devout Catholic (ah, that explained the church business), was originally from Napoli but had left when she was a child, her parents starting their own small shoe importing business in Australia and building it up into ‘quite the going concern’.
All of this Ben told me after he had blurted out his news at the front door, and we had sat down in the lounge room together, having a glass of wine with Barney happily ensconced between us.
I was glad to hear it – all of it – because once he’d stopped apologising for the abrupt way he’d delivered his news, he could not stop talking about her, Monica Golliana, who he had met six months after we broke up, and who did not mind him saying things like ‘quite the going concern’, whereas I always had.
‘Have you got a photo?’ I asked, and he took one from his wallet – Monica Golliana with the curly hair she mostly wore pulled off her face, blowing in the wind as she stood looking out from what was once my balcony.
‘She’s lovely, Ben,’ I said, and she was, dammit.
‘Thanks,’ he said, adding, ‘you should open your present.’ Then once again suffering from premature explanation, he said, ‘it’s those shoes you liked from our autumn collection a couple of years ago, remember the ones with the bows you said were like the ones on a chocolate box?’
I did remember, and was inordinately touched that he had, too – Ben who was not right for me, just as I was not right for him, Ben who was not at all vigorous, but very, very nice.
‘So,’ he said after I had tried them on, ‘who’s that joker who brought me over here?’
‘You mean Will?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, big boofy bloke, knows a lot about ropes.’
‘He’s got the boat service between the mainland and Willow, and he does a few odd jobs around the place,’ I answered.
‘Bit macho, isn’t he?’ Ben asked.
‘I hadn’t really noticed,’ I replied. ‘He’s a nice guy actually, Ben.’
‘Mmm,’ Ben said. ‘I could tell he was dying to ask me how I knew you – I wouldn’t tell him though, he annoyed me with all that rope tying.’
‘Ben, he was on a boat,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but you know how that sort of bloke intimidates me, with all that “Oh, I’m Will and I fix engines and take fishing charters out to sea.” “Oh, hi, I’m Ben and I’m a shoe salesman.”’
We laughed together, and then he asked, ‘So are you seeing him, this manly Will person?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I am not seeing “this manly Will person”, but he’s been a good friend to me here on the island, and he was a good friend of Duncan’s.’
Barney’s ears pricked up, as they always did, at Duncan’s name.
‘What about Josh?’ Ben asked quietly, ‘do you hear from him, or them?’
‘No.’
He nodded.
‘I’ve let it go, you know, Lulu, what happened.’
‘That’s good,’ I said, my throat tightening.
‘Have you?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I answered.
‘I’d still like to smash his face in, though.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, the way he just came in and ruined everything, and then left you to clean up the mess afterwards.’
‘I let him in, Ben,’ I said.
Ben nodded again, then got to his feet.
‘I should go, Lulu,’ he said.
I walked him to the door, then all the way to the jetty where I could see Will’s boat slowly making its way towards us to pick Ben up.
‘You shouldn’t be too hard on yourself, Lulu,’ Ben said, kissing my cheek, ‘and that manly Will person seems like a pretty nice guy, actually.’
I cried just a little watching him go – Ben Moreton, still Keeping Australia on Its Feet, walking all the way out of my life.
Kimmy McAllister, née Varagos, was my favourite of Duncan’s ex-wives.
The newest and the youngest, most people believed she had married him for his money, calling Duncan an old fool, and worse. But while Duncan’s wealth was undoubtedly part of the attraction – when a reporter had facetiously asked her what she liked to read, she’d answered, ‘the BRW Rich List’ – Kimmy was far smarter than people assumed, and there had been a crackling spark between her and Duncan from the moment they met.
Kimmy had been working for a cosmetics brand in a department store, spraying passers-by with perfume and saying: ‘
Have you tried our new fragrance, “Detour”? You never know where it may lead you.’
Duncan, as he later recounted at their wedding reception, had been one of those passers-by, when he stopped to watch her spritz shopper after shopper before walking over and saying, ‘“Detour”? How ridiculous, come on, we’re taking one.’
Then, they had gone back to his flat to resurface two days later, engaged.
‘We just thought what the hell,’ Kimmy told me one day at the studio. ‘And my mother said he’d make an excellent starter husband for me.’
But behind Kimmy’s flippancy lay a deep fondness for Duncan, who, she told me, was a kind, funny and generous husband, who had been unfaithful to her since the day they met.
‘Who cares?’ she’d shrugged. ‘I’m hardly Mother Teresa myself. But I love him,’ she added, ‘I bet they’d all be surprised to know that.’
Duncan’s death had left her, at twenty-five years old, a very wealthy woman who, like all Duncan’s ex-wives, remained loyal to the man who’d picked her up in the perfume department, refusing all interviews or the offer to pen a tell-all of their life together.
‘I just told them I couldn’t write,’ she laughed.
Kimmy was good to Duncan’s kids as well, with Kiki, Kerry-Anne and Karen all trusting them to her care from time to time, which was why she called me one afternoon on Willow, just as I was heading out the door for a walk with Barney.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi Lulu, it’s Kimmy.’
‘Kimmy! Nice to hear your voice, how are you?’
‘Good, really good – fabulously wealthy, actually.’
‘I heard.’
‘How’s Barney boy? Still eating for Australia?’
‘He’s good – you know, Kimmy, if you ever wanted to visit him, you’d be more than welcome.’
‘No thanks, Lulu, can’t think of anything worse than being stuck on some crappy island – no offence – how’s the house?’
Walking on Trampolines Page 22
