Sunlounger - the Ultimate Beach Read (Sunlounger Stories Book 1)

by Belinda Jones

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  THE RED GLOVE

  ***

  Nicola Moriarty

  Destination: Australia

  This is the story of how Penelope met Mike. It’s a simple story I guess – when you consider that all she did was step into a butcher shop with a delivery of fruit and vegetables for the shop’s owner. But if that was the whole story then we’d simply stop right here. We’d leave them standing amongst the lamb chops and the beef mince (on special, two kilos for the price of one) and we’d finish off with the obligatory ‘…and they lived happily ever after.’ But it doesn’t end there. And it doesn’t begin there for that matter. Because things are always more complicated than that.

  Here’s something important that you need to know about Penelope: all of the women in her family will, at times, have remarkably prophetic dreams. Penelope’s grandmother, Madeleine, likes to claim that her dreams are always one hundred per cent spot on. Penelope suspects though that Grandma keeps quiet about the dreams that don’t turn out in order to boost her success rate. Her mother Lynette seems to have the ‘gift’ too – but not as frequently as Grandma. Penelope’s dreams, however, are particularly hit and miss. This is well evidenced by the time she dreamt about the winner of the Melbourne cup. At the time, she was living in a shared house while she studied at uni. She’d just lost her part-time job and was starting to worry about paying her rent. So when she dreamt up the winner, Bakery’s Jacket, just two nights before the race, she was certain this was her big break.

  She put all of her savings on that horse: 427 dollars. The ink on the printed-out ticket from the TAB became smeared as she gripped it in the palm of her hand, her eyes fixed on the television. Bakery’s Jacket did not win. In fact, Bakery’s Jacket didn’t even place. There was nothing remotely remarkable about his run – he finished at the back of the pack.

  When Penelope phoned Grandma to tell her all about it, Grandma responded airily, ‘Good gracious darling, I thought everyone knew that Fool’s Delight was going to win this year.’

  Other times, Penelope’s ‘gift’ worked perfectly well. But of course, these were the times when she didn’t really want to see what was coming. Like the day in late November, when she’d just completed her third and final year at Sydney University. She had woken that morning and irrevocably known that her boyfriend Clayton was going to leave her. Not today, not tomorrow – but soon. She was eight months pregnant at the time – unplanned of course (you know how it is, young kids and their inability to just try a little harder to rip open the condom packet before succumbing to their sticky hormonal desires). Clayton had promised her that he would stay, that one day, they’d even marry. So surely this dream couldn’t be true, could it?

  Six months later, when Lucy was still just a gurgling, giggling baby, Penelope’s prediction came to pass. Clayton didn’t even leave a note.

  And so, six years later, here we are in Mike’s Mixed Meats shop, on the main street of Penelope’s hometown in country New South Wales. Penelope is the one with the long brown ponytail, tied to the side so that it falls over one shoulder. She has pale skin and a small scattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She’s pretty, but then isn’t every girl pretty in their own way? You’ll recognise Mike because it’s his shop – he’s the one behind the counter, with a blue-and-white-striped apron. He’s average height with broad shoulders and strong hands that expertly fillet the steaks on the bench in front of him. He shaved just this morning, but he already has that sexy, unkempt stubble look that only some men can achieve. In a word, he’s cute. But aren’t all guys cute in their own way?

  So how did we get here? I suppose we should take a step back and join Penelope and Lucy on the coach that is bringing them out to the country from Sydney for an extended holiday.

  *

  Penelope had her arm around the small sleeping form of Lucy, her head tilted in an attempt to catch the breeze from the open window in front of her. A jolt as the bus hit a pothole caused Lucy to wake and look up at Penelope, frowning for a moment from under her long, straight cut fringe as she took in their surroundings. ‘How much longer?’ she asked sleepily.

  ‘I’d estimate an hour and a half,’ Penelope replied. ‘You’ve slept for ages, it’s been so boring,’ she added, tickling Lucy’s ribs to make sure she’d woken properly – because she’s that type of mum – the type that can’t quite believe that they’re not still a kid themselves.

  ‘MUM!’ Lucy laughed, squirming away from her. ‘You’re the parent, you’re supposed to be happy that I’m not bugging you.’

  ‘But I want to play a game,’ Penelope whined. ‘Play I Spy with me.’

  ‘No,’ said Lucy firmly, ‘I Spy is stupid and boring. Give me your iPhone and I’ll set us up a game of chess.’ (Because Lucy is one of those kids – the type that people like to smile at fondly as they tell her mother that she is ‘wise beyond her years’).

  ‘I loved I Spy when I was a kid,’ said Penelope grumpily, as she pulled her phone out of her pocket.

  ‘There’s probably an app for it,’ Lucy said as she snatched the phone out of Penelope’s hands and began expertly working her way through the menus. ‘You can play it by yourself if you like.’

  Two games of chess and forty-five minutes later, Lucy suddenly looked up at Penelope. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘How long will we stay with Grandma and Grandma?’

  ‘Not for too long. We just need enough time to get back on our feet. Then we’ll find our own place again. It’s going to get confusing though if you keep calling both of them Grandma.’

  ‘But you said Great-Grandma doesn’t like to be reminded that she’s so old.’

  ‘She doesn’t.’

  Penelope wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing Madeleine and Lynette again. It was likely that she’d be in for a fair few ‘I told you so’ lectures. Penelope had grown up living with her mother and grandmother above the family pub. The Cherry-Field Hotel had been in their family for generations. Grandpa died young, and Penelope’s dad fell for a country and western singer passing through town when Penelope was fifteen. She spent her childhood playing darts with the pub’s older patrons and learnt to pull a beer for the customers at a highly inappropriate age. It was always expected that Penelope would one day take over running the pub. Then she turned eighteen, announced that she was moving to Sydney to study web development and that she had no desire to take over the pub or to live out her life in the far west.

  Madeleine and Lynette tried everything to make Penelope stay: guilt trips, the cold shoulder, matchmaking her with any and every eligible boy in town. Madeleine even resorted to fabricating dreams which foretold Penelope’s untimely death if she moved to the city. Penelope could always tell when she was lying though – it was usually in the detail, she always took it one step too far.

  It wouldn’t matter to them that Penelope had actually picked up a great job with a web design agency straight out of uni, that she’d continued to work as a single mother when Clayton abandoned them. And it also wouldn’t matter that it wasn’t her fault that the agency had decided to make cutbacks. Nope, they would happily pounce on the fact that, eventually, she’d failed in her big move to the city.

  As the bus pulled into the main street of her hometown, Penelope looked out at the familiar landscape. The ornate store fronts, brightly painted in yellows, greens and blues. The small trees scattered along the footpath and the park in the town centre, full of flowerbeds, overflowing with fuchsia and orange gerberas. The bus pulled up out the front of the old cinema. Built in the fifties, the town was famous for it – it still had the same pl
ush red seats and hanging velvet curtains. It showed only one movie at a time, released each month on the fifteenth. Next door was a matching old-style ice cream parlour. People came from the adjoining towns just to visit their cinema and eat ice cream afterward. On the outskirts of town, Belle’s River wound its way through the trees; it was wide and deep and almost never dried up – not even in the driest of seasons.

  Out on the street, Penelope and Lucy had to stop as the wall of heat hit them. ‘Jesus,’ said Penelope, ‘I forgot how damn hot it is out here.’

  ‘It’s so hot I can smell it,’ announced Lucy. ‘Can’t you?’ she added, ‘Can’t you smell the heat?’

  ‘I think what you can smell is the exhaust from the bus,’ Penelope replied.

  ‘No,’ said Lucy firmly. ‘It’s the heat – it’s getting in my nostrils.’

  ‘Right,’ said Penelope, ‘I guess we’d better get you inside then. Come on, Grandma’s pub isn’t far.’

  It was Lynette that spotted them first. She flew out from behind the counter and scooped Lucy up into her arms like she was still a toddler. Penelope stood back and waited, eventually reaching out to prod her mother’s shoulder. ‘Uh, hi Mum, I’m here too you know. Or did you think Lucy just hitched a ride on her own?’

  ‘Sorry, Pen,’ she said, finally putting Lucy back down on her feet and leaning in to give her a hug. ‘I can’t help it. She’s just so damn adorable, although she could use a haircut,’ she added as she pulled back. ‘Besides, she’s never abandoned me.’ Her eyes fell on their suitcases then, and Penelope watched as the realisation swept across her face. ‘Not just a short visit then.’

  They were interrupted by Madeleine, who was practically knocking her customers off their bar stools as she charged through the pub to get to them. ‘Lucy!’ she cried out as, once again, Penelope played second fiddle to her daughter.

  Madeleine then turned her attention on Penelope. ‘The prodigal child. Decided to finally tuck your tail between your legs and come back, did you?’

  ‘Well, surely you were expecting us. You would have foreseen it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, don’t tease her,’ said Lynette. ‘Come on, we’ll get you both upstairs and into the spare room.’

  Several hours later, Penelope gently closed the bedroom door and then crept downstairs to the lounge room where Madeleine and Lynette were waiting for her.

  ‘She’s already fast asleep,’ she said as she sat down on the couch and curled her feet up underneath her. It was late, close to 10pm, but the heat was still stifling and the balcony doors had been thrown open to tempt an unlikely breeze inside. The familiar smells of the town drifted in on the wind: Jacaranda trees and a citrus scent from the orchard up the road.

  ‘Must be exhausted,’ said Lynette. ‘Busy couple of days, I imagine.’

  ‘You could say that,’ said Penelope, reaching for the glass of red wine that was sitting on the coffee table. ‘This mine?’ she asked, taking a sip without waiting for a response.

  ‘So. What’s your plan, Pen?’ Lynette asked, ‘Are you here to…’

  ‘Stay?’ finished Madeleine abruptly.

  ‘We’re here for a few months, sort of a long-term holiday, if that’s okay with both of you. I need to find a job, earn some money—’

  Madeleine cut her off, ‘You’ll work in the pub, of course.’

  ‘I’ll help out in the pub,’ Penelope corrected, ‘but I’ll find another job as well – build up my savings, then we’ll head back to Sydney. Lucy can go to Binnara Road Public while we’re here.’

  Madeleine squinted her eyes at Penelope, paused for a moment, then said, ‘A few months, eh? We’ll see about that.’

  *

  That rather ominous proclamation by Madeleine brings us spinning back through the town and through the weeks to the butcher shop where Penelope and Mike are waiting for us. To be honest watching this encounter is probably going to make us feel a little uncomfortable, a little… voyeuristic, if you will. I’m not saying they’re about to get their kit off. It’s just that there’s going to be some tension in the air. Sparks. I couldn’t tell you why – I don’t know what’s caused these two to have such an instant attraction. It’s just one of those moments. An ‘In all the butcher shops in all the world I can’t believe you walked into this one’ kind of moment.

  Penelope’s there because a week or so after arriving in town she picked up a job delivering fresh fruit and vegetables for a local family business. Fleetwood’s Farmed Goods provided her with an old beaten-up Ute and Penelope works in shorts and a singlet, driving around with the windows wide open, eating fresh, cold strawberries from the punnet on her lap. She’s not ready to admit it to herself yet – but it’s actually a pretty damn good life. She’s also there because a couple of rabbits got into Mike’s backyard veggie patch the other night – otherwise he never would have needed to place an order with Fleetwood’s. People say rabbits are pests, but look at these two bunnies, inadvertently causing love to blossom. Like fluffy, buck-toothed cupids.

  The shop is rather busy on Friday afternoon when Penelope arrives. Gladys is buying marinated chicken wings, John’s picking up a bone for his dog, the Clarkes need a kilo and a half of diced veal for tonight’s casserole. But when Penelope walks in and Mike looks up from the stainless steel scales and sees her, everyone falls silent. Yes, really, that’s how obvious it is. Ruth Clarke starts elbowing her husband in the ribs and they all turn to watch as Penelope is drawn closer and closer to the counter. Penelope and Mike don’t actually utter a single word to one another. But when Mike signs the delivery slip, he automatically scrawls his phone number underneath it, knowing – just knowing – that she will use it. And when Penelope pushes the box across to him, she purposely allows her bracelet to slip off her wrist and fall in amongst the mangoes and mandarins, knowing – just knowing – that Mike will track her down to return it.

  It seems perfect, doesn’t it? It looks as though one way or another, they will contact each other. They’ll go out on a date, probably to Collito’s Italian restaurant on Finch Street. They’ll have a second date, where they’ll watch a terrible movie in the town’s famous cinema and afterwards they’ll both laugh about how bad it was while they eat ice cream. Mike will meet Lucy and tell Penelope that she’s adorable. Penelope and Mike will fall in love, everything will work out happily ever after.

  Except that it doesn’t – well, not just yet anyway, because they don’t make it to that first date at Collito’s. And Penelope doesn’t use Mike’s number to phone him and when he contacts her to return her bracelet, she avoids his call.

  So what went wrong?

  Penelope had one of her dreams. It happened that same night after she met Mike, when she was back in her bedroom above the pub, falling asleep feeling thrilled about the possibilities, listening to the sound of Lucy breathing deeply in the bed beside her.

  The following morning Madeleine and Lynette were confused. They’d known that Penelope was interested in Mike. ‘But what do you mean you don’t want to see him? You practically floated in here yesterday after you met him. Why the sudden change?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she continually repeated.

  They wouldn’t let up though. Eventually, they wore her down. ‘I had a dream,’ she explained. ‘There’s something not right about him.’

  ‘But what kind of dream?’ asked Madeleine, leaning across the kitchen table.

  ‘It’s hard to explain. I couldn’t really tell you what it is that’s wrong, it’s more of a feeling.’

  ‘What happened in the dream?’ asked Lynette.

  ‘He gave me a pair of red gloves,’ she replied.

  There was a pause as Madeleine and Lynette stared back at her, then Madeleine exclaimed, ‘Oh well, goodness me, red gloves, what an absolute beast.’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Penelope crossly. ‘I’m telling you, that dream was a bad sign.’

  It didn’t matter how much Madeleine and Lynette tried to argue with h
er or convince her that she had it wrong, she was certain that there was a problem with Mike – and it was all linked to those horrible red gloves.

  ‘Have you tried exploring the dream? Digging a little deeper to figure out what it really does mean?’ Lynette tried one morning.

  ‘No. I don’t want to because I don’t want to know.’ Penelope was unmovable on the matter.

  Two weeks passed with Penelope feeling more and more miserable. The weather changed abruptly as it was likely to do in this part of the west: rain. Nothing but showers and storms and rain, rain, rain. You know as well as I do that the pitter-patter sound of rain on a tin roof after weeks of heat is wonderfully welcome – at first. But there comes a point where a person realises that they need to see the sun again.

  Penelope started wearing gumboots when she went to the Fleetwood’s farm to collect her deliveries each morning. She drove around with the windows wound up tight, the wipers on their fastest setting, constantly reaching forward to rub at the steamed up windscreen so that she could see the road. She continued to have her recurring dream, a dream that was increasingly becoming more nightmarish with each passing night. When she wasn’t on deliveries, she busied herself designing a website for the pub. Who knew, perhaps if others saw the site and were impressed, she might pick up a few clients while she was out here.

  She had ducked back into the pub to break for lunch one day when a tap on her shoulder made her turn from the bar. Mike was standing behind her, a nervous look on his face as he waited.

  ‘Hi,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Hi.’