by Lily Malone
‘Bowie rocks.’ Wait till you see all the disco.
Jake flicked through more of her titles. Her record collection needed five shelves. Disco took up the bottom three. Pointer Sisters. Boney M. Bee Gees. Diana Ross. John Paul Young. Marcia Hines. Chaka Khan. Donna Summer.
‘Why all the disco?’ Jake asked.
Sam rolled his eyes. ‘Mum and her lame music.’
‘Disco isn’t lame. Disco is the best.’
They were the beats she’d swum to in the pool for all those years. Disco gave her perfect rhythms for a freestyle stroke and kick. Singing disco tunes in her head would keep her swimming when every muscle ached. Three more laps. A race to finish those laps before she got to the end of the song.
Ella moved to the fridge and took out the bottle of white wine she’d opened the previous night, tipping it to Jake. ‘What will you have?’
‘Beer if you’ve got it.’
‘I’ve got a German beer. It’s what Erik drinks. It’s nice.’
Jake’s gaze rested on her face. ‘He won’t mind me drinking his beers?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Okay. A beer sounds great.’
Ella poured her wine, grabbed Jake’s beer and shut the fridge. ‘Bottle or glass?’
‘Bottle is fine.’
‘Can I get Percy something to eat, Mum?’ Sam asked.
‘He has some seed in his cage,’ Jake said. ‘Clip the door so he can go in if he gets tired or thirsty and he’ll be fine.’
Ella checked that Sam and the bird were clear of the back door, then pushed it open with her toe and slipped through. Jake followed, closed the door and took the beer bottle from her, clinking it with her glass before he tipped back his head and took a hefty swallow.
She sat on the side of the table facing into the backyard and Jake sat opposite, looking back at Ella’s rented house. As suburban rentals go, it was solid enough, but it was a far cry from the amazing view they’d shared yesterday at Jake’s place. He took a long drink from his beer and when he’d finished, he examined the label.
‘That’s not bad,’ he said. ‘Germans know what they’re doing with beer.’
Ella sipped her wine. She would have liked to tell Jake about her conversation with Henry Graham last night, but this didn’t feel like a work situation.
‘And cars,’ Jake said, a half smile tugging the corner of his lips.
‘Pardon?’
‘Germans know what they’re doing with beer and cars.’
‘Oh.’
The longer she sat there trying to think up conversation, the harder it became to think of something interesting to say.
Ella shifted her weight, turning a right angle on the bench so she could bring her right foot up on the seat beside her, hugging an arm around her knee.
‘Washing machines, dishwashers …’ Jake said, putting the beer bottle to his lips.
It was Ella’s turn to smile. ‘Wurst, Kransky.’
Jake’s mouth went from being sealed around the bottle to a chuckle, and he put the bottle down.
Ella relaxed.
That was when Jake pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head, and met her eyes with an intensity that was a shock all of its own.
‘I’m a simple man, Ella,’ he said. ‘I haven’t wanted to get to really know a girl in a long, long time. With you? I have so many questions. I want to know everything. I want to know about when you were a girl. Were the kids mean to you at school? Did you love your parents? Do you have brothers or sisters? What was it like to swim fast as a fish?’
It made her tummy get tight like those almost forgotten days when she’d stood poised on the blocks, shaking out her arms, staring at the black line on the bottom of a pool that went forever.
The starter’s gun was seconds away but she’d been ready and waiting for this moment all her life.
‘I want to know what makes you happy and sad, and what gets you out of bed in the morning, and I’m thinking about every single thing I could do to you that would make you want to stay in that bed every morning with me.’ Jake said.
No time for anything now but to suck in one last breath and put it all on the line.
Dive. Go.
CHAPTER
16
‘Gosh.’ Ella swallowed.
‘That’s all you can say? Gosh?’ Jake had to laugh. He’d anticipated something a little more enlightening than gosh.
Ella jiggled her knee on the bench. ‘Well, you throw something like that at me … out of the blue.’
‘Not so out of the blue. You know I’m interested. I told you that yesterday. I told you I had an ulterior motive for bringing that darn Houdini bird to work—it was all so I could bring him out here today. The bird and the bike. I like you, Ella. I want to get to know you better. Spend time with you. I want you to know me.’
She hugged her knee tighter into her chest. ‘I’m really, really lousy at this, Jake.’
This, Jake took to be him and her because she waved her hand between them, then she laughed and it was a sad and frustrated sound, but it was special to him because it was something.
‘I was never much good at talking to boys. I spent all my time in a swimming pool. I didn’t go to parties. I never stayed up late or snuck out of training to do something teenage-y and normal. The one time I did—’ she stopped short.
‘What?’ he prodded.
‘It was a disaster.’
‘See, I want to know that too. All the disasters.’
‘No, you really don’t. My life is one big disaster.’
She’d clammed up on him again, and he let it go. She could have her secrets. If she’d let him, they had all the time in the world to discover each other.
Jake put his hand across the table, reaching towards her, palm up. It took a very long time, but finally Ella let go of the stranglehold she’d had around her knees and reached her left hand into his.
He closed his fingers around her palm, felt soft, cool skin and squeezed.
She picked up their joined hands and not-very-gently bashed his knuckles on the weathered timber, and that was something too: confusion, anger, emotion.
‘You think I’m pushing you,’ he said.
‘You are, and I’m buggered if I know why. I mean look at me.’ She banged her other arm across her chest, warming up. ‘I’m a failed swimmer who got knocked up and missed the Olympics: the biggest swim of my life. I married a man I shouldn’t, and I feel like shit now because he loves me but I don’t—’ her voice broke and the crack scraped at Jake like a knife across bone. ‘I can’t. I can’t do that anymore with Erik. I can’t be Ella Brecker anymore. She feels like such a liar.’
The grip Ella had on Jake’s fingers got tighter and tighter, till her fingernails were like a vice.
Jake sat back. He had to. The intensity rolled off her.
‘All my life I’ve had people tell me what to do. My parents. My coach.’
‘Is that why you married Erik? Because your parents told you to?’
‘My parents hated Erik.’
‘Because he told you to, then?’
‘He didn’t tell me to. He asked me.’
‘You were pregnant with his child. It was the right thing to do.’ It was what he would have done if Cassidy had given him any kind of chance.
Ella sighed deep enough to puff her hair from her face. ‘I can’t talk about Erik and me. Not yet.’
Not yet, but someday.
‘Okay.’ He squeezed her palm. ‘So who told you to move to Chalk Hill?’
Her eyes cut sharply to him. ‘No one told me.’
‘You said people always told you what to do.’
‘I meant before, Jake.’ She waved her hand at him. ‘I’m twenty-nine now.’
‘So why did you make the decision to come to Chalk Hill?’
She hesitated, and he thought she wasn’t going to answer. Maybe it was all tied up in the Erik subject she’d just closed.
‘Rio,’ she muttered.
‘And real estate, I guess, but Rio was the biggest reason.’
‘I don’t get it?’
‘The Rio Olympics … they made me realise how long ago my swimming career was, and I’ve been doing nothing with my life since. I had all these dreams, and I haven’t achieved a thing.’
‘You had a marriage. Sponsorships. An elite swimming centre—’
She shook her head. ‘That was Erik’s.’
‘You had Sam together. He’s something good.’
Immediately she bristled. ‘He tries to do skids on the local bowling green and throws rocks apparently,’ her eyes flashed to his, ‘and you never did tell me about that. I’m not doing particularly brilliantly on the mother front either. And now I’m not very successfully trying to sell your nanna’s house, which happens to be my only listing. The truth is I haven’t had any real clue about what I’m doing since the day I climbed out of a swimming pool for the last time and I feel like a fraud almost every day that goes by. I’m a mother trying to do the best she can and I’m never sure it’s good enough. There. Are you happy now?’
Jake would have liked another beer so he could take a long sip and look like he was thinking deep and meaningful thoughts … instead of how great it would be to take all that frustration, all that passion, and unravel Ella in his arms. Make her shout out his name as she came undone. That’s what she needed. To let herself go.
Maybe he should start with a kiss?
‘And anyway, if we’re on the bloody subject about what makes who tick, what about you then, Mr Simple? What’s a guy like you doing on his own all this time? Are you afraid of commitment? Do you fart in the bath? Snore like a train? What’s wrong with you that there’s no wife waiting at home with the two point five kids?’
That’s what sucked about being politically correct. Someone else filled the gap while you were thinking about what to say or whether it was too soon to say it, and you missed the moment.
Just kiss the girl already, Jake.
He sighed. ‘Mr Simple needs another beer.’
‘No way. No bloody way.’ Ella banged his poor beaten-up knuckles on the table. ‘You don’t get to do that. It’s not a one-way spill session.’
‘Okay, okay.’ He pried his hand from hers and shook his fingers, making a show of it, eventually finding himself rewarded when she smiled.
‘Sorry if I broke your hand.’
‘I’ll survive. I think. Is that how Erik lost his arm?’
‘Jake!’ She punched his shoulder, but she knew he was joking. The punch wasn’t hard and the laughing helped.
‘Okay, so, Ella … I am not anywhere near as complicated as you. I grew up on the farm, went to school here. I studied business agriculture at university in Perth, and I studied farming at the school of my dad’s farm. I travelled for a year in my early twenties, went to Nepal, Europe, and when I came back I started work at the hardware store, and when Dad retired, I took over the shop and the farm. Very happy family. Three brothers. Now Mum and Dad are off doing the grey nomad thing, and they’ve left me in charge.’
‘Okay, Mr Simple … what about the lack of wife and kids? I’ve seen you with Sam and you’re amazing with him for someone who doesn’t have kids of his own. Don’t you want kids?’
That was harder. The question was a kick in the guts. ‘I want kids. Course I do.’
‘Oh, I get it. You just haven’t found the right woman yet?’
‘No.’ He’d never told anyone about Cassidy.
‘So what’s the hold-up? I can’t imagine you’d lack willing partners, and you’re very upfront. Nothing shy and retiring about you.’
‘This is Chalk Hill. It’s not like there are women behind every tree.’
‘True. But anything goes these days. What do they call it? Swipe right?’
Swipe right? ‘What?’
She blushed. ‘Online dating.’
‘What does swipe right mean?’
‘Never mind. What I mean is, if you really wanted to meet someone, I think you’d put yourself out there. So why haven’t you? Put yourself out there?’
‘I guess a person doesn’t get to Olympic level swimming without being persistent, does she,’ he said.
‘I didn’t make the Olympics,’ Ella stated softly.
They sat for a while, listening to cicadas and the approaching night, and Jake knew it was time to talk if he wanted to take things further with Ella, which he did.
‘I met a girl the year I travelled. I met her in Nepal, she was with another girl in a mixed group of about six, and I was on my own and we hooked up and hiked together, and we got together. It didn’t take long, we were young, on holiday, climbing up on the roof of the world. I asked her to marry me after we hiked up to the top of Mount Snowdon in Wales about four months later. I thought she was the one.’
‘The one?’
He nodded.
‘What happened?’
‘She laughed at me and told me to ask her again to marry her when we got back to Australia.’
‘She laughed at you?’
‘Yep.’ And shit did it kill him at the time. He’d walked the whole way up rehearsing how he’d do it, looking for the perfect spot, somewhere where he’d have two minutes with no people around except Cassidy and him. Somewhere she’d never forget and he’d always remember. And she laughed. Not in a bitchy way, just in a you can’t be serious way. He’d never been more serious. He’d been serious as a bushfire on a total fire-ban day.
‘I figured I’d do what she said, bide my time and ask her when we got home. She was from Noosa but I just figured she’d come here, to Chalk Hill. We’d have the farm. We’d have a bunch of little farm kids.
‘Cassidy told me she was pregnant and I was over the moon, even if I wasn’t sure how it happened. She’d been on the pill. We were in Calcutta for New Year and Cassidy got sick. A real case of Delhi-belly. So maybe the pill didn’t work. We didn’t know.’
This is where it got really hard. Jake steeled himself to spill the words. ‘That baby would have been about Sam’s age now, if he’d lived. I can’t look at kids Sam’s age and not think about him.’
‘You had a little boy?’ Ella breathed beside him. Her hand found his again. Her eyes glistened with fat tears, but they didn’t spill.
‘He was never born. She got rid of him.’ His voice tightened. A decade on and it hit him in the stomach every time he thought about. ‘I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl, but I think of it as a him. A boy.’
‘She didn’t tell you? Like, I mean … oh God sorry, Jake. I mean, you weren’t consulted with what she chose, or did you decide together?’
‘She told me she was pregnant and she knew I was happy about it, even if it wasn’t planned. She said she wanted to go home to her family and her own doctor back in Australia, so she left the UK early. We’d been planning to work in London for a while, stay longer and do more travelling. She said she’d go to Noosa, then come to WA when I got home. I had prepaid tickets to a Wallabies/England test match at Twickenham with a mate and I really wanted to go, and she said I should stay. So I stayed in the UK another six weeks.
‘And things changed after that, even on the phone. I thought it was just the distance and the telephone. My mate talked about pregnancy hormones, said his sister turned into a right cow when she was pregnant.
‘I talked to Cassidy before I booked my flight home. By this stage, I was going to fly to Noosa because I wanted to be with her so bad … and basically, she told me on the phone not to come, that she didn’t want to see me, that she didn’t want to be with me. She said I was her security blanket to travel through Europe and do the things we did … and that was great, but I wasn’t her forever guy, I was just the holiday guy.
‘And I think she knew I would have pushed it … because she said then that she’d had an abortion. She’d “got rid of the kid”. Those were her words. “I’ve got rid of the kid, so there’s no need for you to come.”’
Ella squeezed his fingers as s
he sat quiet beside him in the growing dark.
‘So do I deserve a bloody beer now?’ Jake said.
‘I think we both do. I’ll get you one.’
Ella stood beside him, and he sensed her eyes looking down. She put a hand on his shoulder.
‘At least there’s a bright side, Ella.’
‘Yeah? What’s that?’
‘I don’t fart in the bath.’
CHAPTER
17
Ella didn’t walk into Begg & Robertson next morning, oh, no. She dead-set bounced, light and joyful, and not even Sam’s sulks over his cornflakes about, ‘Why do I have to go to school? I hate school’, could bring her down.
What a night. What a beautiful, wonderful, achingly emotional night.
What a man.
‘Morning, Harvey,’ Ella called to her boss as she set her handbag on the carpet against the wall of her space and took the final bite of her apple, before throwing the core into the kitchen bin.
‘Good morning,’ Harvey said, coming out of his office with a stash of paper in his hand. ‘This will make you smile.’
‘I’m already smiling,’ Ella said, but she reached for the papers.
She recognised the writing instantly. It was the offer form on Irma Honeychurch’s house. Henry Graham’s previous $429,000 figure for Irma’s place had been neatly ruled out and a new number stood in its place.
Ella’s mouth dropped open. ‘He’s gone up fifty grand just like that?’
Harvey patted his stomach. ‘He’s keen. Wonder what Jake will say?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ella replied, thinking about it. In everything else they’d talked about last night, Henry Graham’s offer on the Honeychurch house hadn’t been mentioned once.
‘Well, better find out,’ Harvey said, and Ella reached for her office phone to dial Jake’s number. Then Harvey added, ‘And when you get back, I want to talk about this swimming thing.’
The bits of her brain that made fingers select and press numbers stopped working. Everything stopped working.
‘What swimming thing?’ Ella asked Harvey.
He made a fluttering motion with his hands that was meant to direct her back to dialling the phone. ‘Not now. When you get back. Go on. Call Jake.’ And he backed through the door and into his office, like an old-man reef fish retreating into his hole.
